| Since the idea of using the Voronoi tessellation approach for modeling randomly packed hollow-fiber bundles was published in AIChE Journal in 1994, no one has published a code for plotting Voronoi diagrams bounded by a circle. Mathematica 4.0 (published by Wolfram Research, Inc. in 1999) has the function to produce the unbounded and bounded Voronoi diagrams in Euclidean coordinates only. In this work, a code to plot Voronoi diagrams bounded by a circle and to estimate the area of an individual Voronoi polygon has been developed. Therefore, we are able to correct the boundary error in the Voronoi diagram boundary published in an article of Journal of Membrane Science, 1997, as well as several other offsetting errors made in that article. The authors of that article modeled solvent extraction with reaction only (i.e., they did not consider solvent extraction without reaction) and with a single of type HFM module only. In this work, to model hollow-fiber membrane modules by applying both the lumped parameter model and the tessellation mode, we consider solvent extraction with and without reaction and include different HFM module types. Does the tessellation model perform better than the lumped parameter model in solvent extraction? According to the results presented here, the short answer is no, but the results from both simulation models are close. The extraction rate calculated from the lumped parameter model is slightly higher than that from the tessellation model. |
