Abstract
Much of the research in the analysis of Temperature polarisation (TP) and the productivity of a membrane distillation (MD) system tends to concentrate on operational conditions. However, substantial enhancements in permeate flux can be realised through the incorporation of fundamental design modifications. This research showed that TP can be successfully mitigated almost to a level of non-existence, by manipulating the module orientation and flow channel height of an in-house designed direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) system. Notably, at higher flow channel heights, changing the module orientation from the default horizontal position with the feed side on top (FST) to a sideway orientation led to a remarkable 90% increase in the permeate flux of the DCMD module. Permeate side on top (PST) and sideways orientations performed significantly better than FST for larger channel heights, while at low channel heights, the improvement was slight. Temperature measurements proved that thermal convective currents and secondary flows played a vital role in assisting or opposing TP and cannot be disregarded when investigating the hydrodynamics of a DCMD system. The impact of flow directions was insignificant with different channel heights, while the proximity of the flow inlets played a pivotal role in shaping the temperature profiles along the membrane.
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
4-1-2024
Volume
698
Publication Title
Journal of Membrane Science
Publisher
Elsevier
School
School of Engineering
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Comments
Hijaz, H. A., Zargar, M., Shafieian, A., Razmjou, A., & Khiadani, M. (2024). Experimental investigation of varying design parameters on the production rate and temperature polarisation of a DCMD system. Journal of Membrane Science, 698, article 122603. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.memsci.2024.122603