“…Fouling of the membrane by particles in the feed is unavoidable in successful filtration and understanding of the fouling mechanism(s), critical for improving filtration performance and preventing filter failure, has therefore been the target of significant research effort (see, for example, (Ives 1970;Spielman 1977;Tang et al 2011;Iritani 2013;Iritani and Katagiri 2016)). Extensive experimental studies (Ho and Zydney 1999;Tracey and Davis 1994;Jackson et al 2014;Lee et al 2019Lee et al , 2017Iwasaki et al 1937;Lin et al 2009) have been reported for a range of filtration scenarios, mostly focusing on a feed consisting of a single type of particle (Ho and Zydney 1999;Tracey and Davis 1994;Jackson et al 2014;Iwasaki et al 1937;Lin et al 2009), though possibly with a distribution of particle sizes (Ostwal et al 2016;Lee et al 2019Lee et al , 2017. In reality, however, filtration typically involves feed containing multiple species of particles, e.g., in gold extraction from ore (Ricci et al 2015;Acheampong and Lens 2014), vaccine extraction Emami et al (2018), and other bio-product purifications after fermentation (Van der Sman et al 2012), which interact with the membrane differently (Chen et al 2004;Debnath et al 2019).…”