Investigation of membranes properties effects on direct contact membrane distilation performance

Membrane distillation (MD), a thermally driven process involving hydrophobic micro-porous membranes has acquired extensive attention of academic research and is arranged to become an alternative solution to other membrane separation processes such as reverse osmosis (RO). Choice of membrane for MD applications is a compromise between low thermal conductivity attained by thicker membranes and high flux achieved by thin membrane, large pore size, and porosity and yet very few research groups have examined the effects of these membrane parameters on direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) performance. In this work, six commercial membranes are used to study simultaneously heat and mass transfer in DCMD by predicting permeate flux at different feed temperature, feed concentration and feed/permeate flow rates. The results show a membrane with pore size of 0.22μm, thickness of 125μm, porosity of 75% and conductivity of 0.041W/m.K presents the most amount of permeate flux compared to the other membranes, indicating likely optimum membrane properties for DCMD process