Towards Simulation of Clogging Effects in Wastewater Pumps: A Review of the State-of-the-Art in Cloth Modelling and Challenges in the Simulation of Clogging Effects

Simulation of clogging effects caused by cloths in wastewater pumps enables a faster and cheaper design process of wastewater pumps, which potentially leads to a reduction in the occurrence of clogging. Four potential methods for cloth simulation are reviewed and the challenges of each method are identified and compared.

These methods are the Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) method, Immersed Boundary (IB) method, Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) coupled with the Finite Element method (FEM), and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) coupled with the Discrete Element method (DEM).

Each method has advantages and disadvantages, and each of them may prove to be applicable for the application. The CFD-DEM approach is chosen for future work.