Abstract
Temperature and concentration polarizations are typical near-surface phenomena that limit the performance of membrane distillation. An effective method for enhancing the performance of membrane distillation is to mechanically disturb or break the polarization effect near the membrane surface. In this study, we focused on disturbing the flow boundary layer formed near the membrane surface to eliminate the influence of temperature and concentration polarizations on the membrane distillation performance by introducing insoluble particles as fillers into the feed. It is believed that the sliding/scrolling of insoluble particle fillers on the membrane surface is a practical approach for breaking the boundary layer on the membrane surface and eliminating near-surface polarization. The effects of breaking the near-surface polarization on the membrane distillation performance were systematically investigated via experiments under various conditions and verified with related computational fluid dynamics simulations. The test results demonstrated that the permeate flux, temperature polarization coefficient, and system efficiency of membrane distillation can all be improved with particle fillers. The permeate flux does not increase indefinitely with the rise of particle filler mass flow rate. Moreover, the incorporation of particle fillers is especially effective in enhancing the permeate flux at low feed concentration.
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