Fouling (the accumulation of material on and in the membrane) proved itself to be e.g. for membrane bio reactors (MBR) one of the most influencing factors in the filtration process. One of the possibilities to clean the membrane is sparging air and thereby produce a two-phase flow in the system which induces shear stress on the membrane surface. The problem is that air sparging itself needs a lot of energy and is therefore an important cost factor.

The plate is one of the common membrane geometries. The membrane plates are combined to modules. The optimization of the cleaning process related to the construction and the method of operation of the module were not extensively worked on topics in the past.
Therefore experimental and numerical research is done to determine the influence of different factors such as plate distance, bubble size and liquid circulation veocity.