Membrane distillation of NaCl solution containing natural organic matter

Scaling and fouling in membrane distillation for desalination applications: A review

“…The types of fouling that can occur in membrane systems and therefore potentially found in MD systems can be divided into four categories: inorganic salt scaling or precipitation fouling, particulate fouling, biological fouling, and chemical membrane degradation [25,26,27,28]. The appropriate mitigation methods vary dramatically for each of these [29,30]. The causes also vary strikingly, although particulate fouling can be closely related to the others, as a result of coagulation.…”

“…It is therefore most practical to analyze each of these four types separately. After MD was introduced in the late 60s, the first commercial applications for MD were in the food and semiconductor industries, not desalination [30,31]. Since 1985, the number of publications dealing with MD desalination has increased [31,32].…”

“…Severe protein fouling was observed at temperatures higher than 20-38°C for aqueous solutions containing organic compounds at representative concentrations (i.e., wastewater, NOM, bovine serum albumin, etc.) [30,84,102] but it was practically absent at lower temperatures [103]. Notably, hydrophobic surfaces show an especially high tendency to get fouled by proteins [104], making MD membranes problematic for waters containing proteins, amino sugars or polysaccharides [105].…”

“…Silica scale has proven to be similarly difficult to remove. Acid cleaning has caused mild but incomplete removal in cleaning organic matter on MD membranes [30].…”

A novel approach to fabricate macrovoid‐free and highly permeable PVDF hollow fiber membranes for membrane distillation

“…Figure 3 demonstrates the flux and the energy efficiency obtained in the DCMD process including some other flux data reported by the previous DCMD investigations using hollow fibers. [16][17][18][19][20][21] The energy efficiency in this study has been defined as the fraction of feed brine thermal energy that has been used to evaporate water. Energy efficiency can be easily calculated using the following equation:…”