ABSTRACTThe performance of a dialyzer at a given test condition is strongly affected by its design and flow patterns as well as other factors such as membrane permeability, membrane area and liquid‐side resistances.Mathematical solutions that describe multichambered dialyzers in both countercurrent and cocurrent dialysis modes are given. In limiting cases, as the number of chambers approaches infinity, these solutions yield a simple equation which is essentially the solution to a cross‐flow dialyzer in which blood is unmixed and dialysate fluid is mixed. Currently, it is a rather tedious process to obtain a theoretical dialysance value for a cross‐flow dialyzer even though many such dialyzers are widely used. In reality, a dialyzer cannot achieve its theoretical performance level because actual flow patterns and flow distributions are not ideal. The effect of non‐ideality as a percentage of channeling of dialysate fluid was accounted for in the performance calculations of various types of dialyzers. The ideal single‐chambered dialyzer in the countercurrent mode has the highest theoretical performance. Its performance, however, decreases rapidly as the degree of the non‐ideality increases, while multi‐chambered dialyzers are relatively insensitive to deviation from the id
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