According to laminar flow theory,a numerical method is employed to simulate the non-dimensional velocity distribution of axial flow in the shell side of the hollow fiber module.The effects of the packing ratio φ on the flow volume distribution and the flow resistance coefficient fRe are discussed,and the relationship between fRe and φ in the range 0.1≤φ≤0.7 is obtained.The simulation reveals that the axial flow exhibits non-uniform velocity distribution and obvious channel flow in the randomly distributed fiber bundle.The flow area of the sub-cell tessellated by Voronoi method has a certain relationship with the flow volume distribution.However,the packing ratio φ shows little effect on this relationship.The flow resistance coefficient fRe in the randomly distributed fiber bundle,which increases with the packing ratio,is apparently smaller than that in right triangle array fiber bundles,and matches well with the experimental results of Sullivant and Costello