Energy and exergy analysis and modeling temperature distribution in a membrane distillation feed channel for VMD and DCM

Abstract

This research is a comparative study between vacuum membrane distillation and direct contact membrane distillation technologies. The first part focuses on an energy and exergy analysis of vacuum membrane distillation and direct contact membrane distillation configurations. The results of the energy analysis show the vacuum membrane distillation has lower energy losses across the membrane compared to direct contact membrane distillation. The results of the exergy analysis show that direct contact membrane distillation requires less work compared to vacuum membrane distillation. The second part of this research focuses on modeling of temperature distribution in feed channel for DCMD and VMD. The results of the numerical solution show that the temperature polarization effort in VMD is smaller than in DCMD. The membrane temperature in VMD approach constant temperature case and this reduces dissipated energy in the membrane distillation process.