Numerical simulation on cleaning of clogged pervious concrete pavement

Abstract

The clogging caused by sediments entering the pavement pore structure will lead to the continuous reduction of the permeability of pervious pavement until failure. Therefore, it helpful to study how to effectively recover the permeability performance of pervious pavement, prolong its service life and give full play to its advantages through certain cleaning methods. In this study, computational fluid dynamics - discrete element method (CFD-DEM) coupling method is used for numerical simulation to study the cleaning effect of different cleaning method and cleaning parameters on clogged pervious concrete pavement model. A total of 54 simulation tests were carried out. The results show that both 20 MPa pressure washing and vacuum cleaning +20 MPa pressure washing have the best cleaning effect. Vacuum cleaning is conducive to the removal of fine particles, and the action depth is large. The impact force of pressure washing is strong, but the cleaning capacity for deep layers of pavement is limited. A better cleaning effect can be achieved under the pressure washing angle of 45°–60°. When the clogging materials contain coarse particles, it has a better cleaning efficiency under the pressure washing target distance of 15 mm–20 mm. However, when the clogging materials mainly composed of fine particles, the target distance has little influence on the cleaning effect.