Modelling of particle deposition during impregnation of dual scale fabrics

Abstract

The motion of particles through a system of permeable fibre bundles is considered. The system is discretisised with Voronoi diagrams and the dissipation rate of energy is minimised with respect to the stream function in a system with periodic boundary conditions. The flow of the particles is in the transversal direction to the fibre bundles and the particles are hindered to move out of the plane allowing for two‐dimensional calculations. The motion of particles is assumed to be slow with respect to the flowrate so that particles are driven by the Stokesian force for stationary particles. In this case, the flow distribution is essentially dependent on the particle configuration and strictly follows the motion of particles. When testing different sizes of the particles, it is shown that there is a qualitative agreement between model and experiments previously performed. In particular, stationary flow leads to particle depositions in front of the fibre bundles and small particles move into the fibre bundles while large ones are stuck at the border.