Ceramic membranes have been widely used in chemical industry on account of their inherently superior physical integrity

chemical resistance and separation performance. Rapid development of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has made numerical simulation an effective mean of researching and optimizing the structure and permeability of ceramic membrane tubes. In this paper the permeability of asymmetric ceramic membrane tubes was simulated with CFD in order to optimize the ceramic membrane tube structure and operating parameters. The thickness of ceramic top-layer and intermediate-layer of an asymmetrically-structured membrane is about tens of micron

so an effective simplified calculation model is put forward in this work. A porous media model was applied to the porous support of the ceramic membrane tube. The ceramic top-layer and intermediate-layer of the ceramic membrane tube were described with porous jump boundary conditions. The permeability of ceramic membrane was effectively evaluated by the classic Konzey-Carmen (KC) equation. The CFD results showed a good agreement with the experimental data. This quick and easy calculation method provides an effective tool to optimize the structure of membrane tubes.