Abstract
Membrane distillation is an unprecedented approach demonstrating admirable success in many water purification applications. Recently, many commercial-scale membrane distillation systems with production capacities ranging from 20 L/d to 50 m3/d were improved and assessed. The thermal efficiency and distillate flow of an air-gap membrane distillation (AGMD) system are affected by many factors. We are employing our compact, single-cassette AGMD unit to test these hypotheses. The distillate flow rate of ( 2,4,6) litter- min could be obtained under the following convenient parameters, cold feed inlet temperature (TC,in) between (25 to 10 oC ), hot feed inlet temperature (Th,in) from (40 to 80 oC), feed flow rate (Vf) for both sides from 2 to 6 litter per minutes where distillate flux (Jd) and specific performance ratio (SPR) were considered as the performance indicators for the modelling. To achieve the best results, more than one type of membrane has been used, in addition to utilizing different pore sizes (0.2, 0.45), considering two types of polyvinylidene difluoride (PVDF) thicknesses (100, 200). Apart from this, graphene nanosheets (G) and zeolite nanoparticles (Z) have been added to improve the materials, which will accomplish the best results. All of those experiments are done using local materials obtained from a pilot scale setup located in Egypt.