Seawater desalination is an affordable and viable solution to the growing freshwater scarcity problem in water scarce regions. The current study focuses on cost analysis of Vacuum Membrane Distillation (VMD) setup for removing salts from water. The membrane used in the flat sheet VMD module was Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) with 250 mm × 200 mm dimensions and 165 µm thickness. The experiments were carried out with variations in parameters such as velocity, pressure, concentration, and temperature. For the cost analysis, the operational, maintenance, instrumentation, and capital cost of the lab model was considered and then upscaled. A range of experiments was performed for NaCl and KCl under variations of operating parameters. It was noted that, for the NaCl solution, the increase in temperature from 50 °C to 70 °C doubled the permeate flux. However, for the conditions tested, the concentration shift from 0.25 M to 0.75 M decreased the permeate flux by 1.4% because the increase in ion concentrations along the membrane lowers the vapor pressure, restricting the permeate flux. The results trend for the KCl solution was similar to the NaCl; at temperature T1, it was noted that increased concentration from 0.25 M to 0.75 M significantly reduces the permeate flow. The reduction in permeate flow was nonlinear for a given pressure 30 kPa and velocity 5.22 m/s, but linear for all other variables. It was also observed that with an increase in temperature from 60 °C to 70 °C, the permeate flux for concentration 0.25 M was 49% for all the combinations of pressure and velocity. In addition, permeate flow increased 53% from temperature 50 °C to 60 °C and 49% from temperature 60 °C to 70 °C for both the solutions at a concentration of 0.25 M. This shows that the temperature also had a profound impact on the permeate flux. The economic analysis and market survey shows that the cost of clean water at the lab level was high which can be significantly reduced using a large-scale setup providing 1,000,000 L/H of distilled water.

In regions with limited potable water availability, membrane desalination is being employed to filter water using a pressure-driven approach. Because of the high energy consumption required to produce the pressure differential needed for this method, researchers have been trying different geometric designs of spacer filaments to enhance the amount of permeate flux in terms of energy utilization. The purpose of spacer filaments is to support membranes structurally and induce turbulent mixing in spiral wound membrane desalination. In this paper, the improvement of mass transfer in desalination driven by reverse osmosis has been studied using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) with the introduction of spiral wound membranes that are lined with spacer filaments in a zig-zag formation having alternating diameters for strands. The fluid flow characteristics for a 2-dimensional geometric model were resolved using the open-source program OpenFOAM by changing the Reynolds number to just before the inception of instabilities. Ratios of alternate strand diameters were also varied between one and two. Based on a detailed analysis of velocity contours, pressure distribution, wall shear stresses, and steady-state vortex systems, the research findings offer guidance for employing alternating strand design in zig-zag formation for optimum mass transfer and minimal pressure drop when accounting for concentration polarization.