Understanding and enhancing the direct contact membrane distillation performance by modified heat transfer correlation

Abstract

The sensitivity of direct contact membrane distillation to feed temperatures and feed flow rate is investigated experimentally. At very low flow rates, the process becomes heat transfer limited where the thermal energy of the aqueous feed solution is lost by the conduction resistance minimizing the distillate production. At high flow rates, the film heat transfer coefficient for both liquid solutions increases, creating a larger temperature difference across the membrane boundaries. Hence, the mass fluxes increase linearly with the water flow rate. These findings are also assessed by simulating the heat and mass transfer equations that describe the membrane distillation (MD) thermo-physical operation. It is found that the underlying physics of the MD module must faithfully capture and explain the true process behaviour. Hence, a modified correlation for the Nusselt number is developed and tested.