Flow distribution in the fiber lumen side of a hollow‐fiber module

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Abstract
Little attention has been paid to the flow distribution among many thousands of fibers in the hollow‐fiber modules of artificial kidney, ultrafiltration, and reverse osmosis devices despite its potential importance in the efficiency of the module. Numerical study by a finite‐difference method, as well as experiment by direct sampling from individual fibers and high‐speed photography of a color tracer, has shown that there exists a significant degree of nonuniformity in the flow distribution, which depends on the manifold design, the Reynolds number, and the pressure drop along the fibers.