Abstract
Membrane science and technology has made a tremendous progress during the last decades, and membrane processes have become competitive to the conventional separation methods in a wide variety of applications. Membrane Distillation (MD) is one of the emerging nonisothermal membrane separation processes, which refers to a thermally driven transport of vapor through nonwetted porous hydrophobic membranes, the driving force being the vapor pressure difference between the two sides of the membrane pores. The involved simultaneous heat and mass transfer phenomena through the membrane; the different MD configurations and the various MD applications make MD attractive within the academic community as a kind of didactic application. Benefiting from the low temperature and transmembrane hydrostatic pressure required to perform MD operations, several approaches to make the MD a viable separation technique are proposed. These approaches range from finding new areas of MD applicability and the cooperation of MD with other processes as a pretreatment or post-treatment step, to researches devoted to preparation of membranes together with MD modules and studies of factors affecting MD production associated with the application of some enhancement techniques. Furthermore, the chapter discusses nomenclature in MD, mechanism of MD, and many other concepts.
Published Version
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