Water is becoming scarcer and several authors have highlighted the upcoming problem of
higher water salinity and the difficulty of treating and discharging water. Moreover,
current discoveries of problems with chemicals that have been used for pretreating or
post-treating water alerted scientists to research better solutions to treat water. Membrane
distillation (MD) is a promising technology that might replace current processes as it has
lower pretreatment requirements combined with a tremendous ability to treat a wide
range of feed sources while producing very high product quality. If it enters the market, it
will have a big influence on all products, from food industry to spaceflight. However,
there are several problems which make MD a hot topic for research. One of them is the
question about the real cost of MD in terms of heating feed and cooling distillate over
time with respect to product quantity and quality. In this work, extensive heating and
cooling analyses are covered to answer this question in order to enhance the MD process.
Results show energy cost to produce water and the main source of energy loss for direct
contact membrane distillation (DCMD), and several suggestions are made in order to
better understand and hence enhance the process.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:kaust.edu.sa/oai:repository.kaust.edu.sa:10754/209399 |
| Date | 07 1900 |
| Creators | AbuHannoud, Ali |
| Contributors | Ghaffour, NorEddine, Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering (BESE) Division, Francis, Lijo, Wang, Peng |
| Source Sets | King Abdullah University of Science and Technology |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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