Simulation of water filtration in porous zone based on Darcy's law

Modeling of water filtration through a porous zone subjected to a steady flow with free surface. Under certain assumptions, it is possible to use a predictive process for understanding the mechanisms of filtration of water in a porous zone such as sand dune. The approach is based on the formulation of Darcy porous zone-grained. We examined the validity of Darcy model with the experimental results of a test bench realized in the laboratory. This work was done using the software Fluent family CFD (computational fluid dynamics), which is a commercial code programmed in C and based on the numerical method of finite volumes. For numerical modeling was used both CFD softwares: Gambit (the mesh) and Fluent (solver and postproceseur). Gambit and Fluent are software simulations for 2D or 3D fluid mechanics from the construction of the mesh with Gambit in solving Navier-Stokes equations and post-processing with Fluent. The experimental device used for the testing of filtration. The driver is a glass column of 5 cm diameter and 100 cm height and cylindrical shape. The effective height of the filter bed 60cm, 30 cm is used for filtered water which is kept constant throughout the experiment, the results obtained noted that the difference between the experimental and simulated flow is order of 10(-4). The results allow us to conclude that the filtration rate at operating pressure depends on the turbidity of the water directly affects the porosity of the filter and consequently its permeability.