Investigation of nanoparticle effect on performance of solar membrane distillation

Abstract

Due to the lack of freshwater, membrane and thermal processes as desalination technologies are attractive and the most promising approach to generate freshwater and diminishes the lack of fresh water problems. In the present paper, the applications of titanium nitride nanofluid were optimized by Response Surface Methodology to improve consumption of energy for solar distillation. The substantial independent parameters are solar irradiation, nanofluid concentrations, time, and the dependent parameters are the feed water temperature and the weight of accumulated permeate water. Based on Response Surface Methodology modeling the first response as feed water temperature was fitted to quadratic model and the second response as accumulated permeate water weight was fitted to linear model, which the regression model R-squared of fitted models have appropriate values are 0.96 and 0.9891, respectively, and the p-value of models was < 0.0001 that represents the models are significant. Due to the fitted models and the experiments the highest value of feed water temperature and the weight of accumulated permeate water achieved 93.10 C0 and 8.65 g after 3 h, respectively, by adding the 90.7848 ppm of nanofluid concentration under 5 kW/m2 of solar irradiation.