The removal of film-like deposits is a challenge in many fields of production. For environmental and economic reasons, the cleaning processes need to be optimized. An optimization by means of computational fluid dynamics seems to be beneficial, but is subject to some restrictions, especially in industrial context. General modeling ideas, a subdivision into sub-processes and the significance of time dependent soil behavior are discussed as well as specific concepts related to four basic cleaning mechanisms, namely diffusive dissolution, cohesive separation, viscous shifting and adhesive detachment. Cleaning experiments in fully developed plane channel flow, resembling a simplified plate heat exchanger, are performed with model soils (starch, petroleum jelly, ketchup) which were chosen to represent an almost ideal form of one of the basic cleaning mechanisms.