Fibrous media is the most common method of filtration, which is generally characterized by its pressure drop and filtration efficiency. In this work, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technology was applied to simulate the filtration performance of multi-fiber filters. The pressure drop and filtration efficiency with different fiber arrangements, fiber diameters, face velocities and particle sizes were studied. It was found that filtration efficiency changed with the face velocity for different particle sizes. The layered structures with the same fiber diameters and total solid volume fraction (SVF) were compared, indicating that the dense-sparse structure had the highest filtration efficiency for all the simulated particle sizes at the cost of high pressure drop. Then the dense-sparse structure was optimized to achieve a better filtration performance by using less tiny fibers in the front-row and removing some fibers in the back-row. (C) 2016 The Society of Powder Technology Japan. Published by Elsevier B.V. and The Society of Powder Technology Japan. All rights reserved.