CFD prediction of shell-side flow and mass transfer in regular fiber arrays

Influence of bundle porosity on shell-side hydrodynamics and mass transfer in regular fiber arrays: A computational study

“…Günther et al [16] studied phenomena involving fluid flow and mass transfer in hexagonal fiber arrays while Eloot et al [17] carried out simulations of a twelfth part of a fiber, always considering the bundle arranged in a hexagonal lattice. Also Cancilla et al [18] simulated fluid flow and mass transfer around straight, axially indefinite, fibers arranged in regular square and hexagonal lattices. Dierickx et al [19] studied three different configurations: in-line square, staggered square and equilateral triangle fiber arrays.…”

Hydrodynamics and Mass Transfer in Straight Fiber Bundles with Non-Uniform Porosity

“…A full grid-independence study was unfeasible for the present geometries due to the large number of fibers. Based on a previous grid-independence assessment for a unit cell including a single fiber (Cancilla et al, 2021), the present grid resolution (~2500 finite volumes per fiber in the cross sectional plane) implies a discrepancy of ~5% on the axial Darcy permeability and of less than 1% on the Sherwood number. Therefore, the present results can not be regarded as grid-independent, especially from the hydrodynamic point of view; however, they are acceptable as far as the difference in Darcy permeability and Sherwood number between regions at different porosity is the main point at issue.…”

“…The comparison of fluid dynamics and mass transfer in regular arrays (Cancilla et al, 2021;Happel, 1959;Ishimi et al, 1987;Miyagi, 1958;Sparrow and Loeffler, 1959) as opposed to random distributions (Wang et al, 2003) of hollow fibers has been investigated for both the constant wall flux condition (Bao and Lipscomb, 2002a) and the constant wall concentration one (Bao and Lipscomb, 2002b), and mass transfer entry effects have also been studied (Bao et al, 1999). A recent paper (Sun et al, 2022) focused on the effects of a non-uniform porosity at the fibersmodule case interface on the performance of a gas separation module.…”

Performance Comparison of Alternative Hollow-Fiber Modules for Hemodialysis by Means of a CFD-Based Model

“…Simulations were conducted at unit-cell (single fiber) scale, for regular hexagonal arrays of straight hollow fibers at ~50% of porosity with periodic boundary conditions imposed to all variables between opposite boundaries. Detailed results are reported in [25]. In the general case of mixed flow with both longitudinal (Re z ) and transversal (Re t ) Reynolds numbers being non-zero, mass transfer characteristics can be summarized by stating that Sh D was simply the larger between those computed for purely cross-flow at Re t and purely axial flow at Re z .…”

“…For any geometry, the same grid was used independently of the inlet-outlet configurations. For all the geometries investigated, the computational grids were composed of hexahedral volumes only, known to provide more accurate results than tetrahedral or hybrid grids [25].…”