Abstract
An experimental desalination system coupling a vacuum membrane distillation (VMD) unit and a vacuum tube solar heat collection (SHC) unit was developed and tested. The parametric sensitivity of the VMD unit performance was investigated first using an electric heater as the heat source, and then the whole system was examined using solar heat. It was revealed that hot feed temperatures higher than 65°C and cold-side absolute pressure lower than 0.02 MPa are favorable for high trans-membrane flux. The startup time of the SHC-VMD system was very short, less than 10 min. The VMD unit ran intermittently for 305 h in five months, individually or together with the solar heat system, showing good suitability to unsteady solar energy and to the intermittent off-and-on operation mode. The average trans-membrane flux in the experiments of SHC-VMD combined system was about 4 kg/(m2 h), and the specific heat consumption was around 750 kWh/m3.
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