EVALUATION AND PERFORMANCE OF MEMBRANE DISTILLATION MD PROCESS FOR BRACKISH WATER DESALINATION

Desalination has been progressively more adopted over the last decades as an opportunity, and sometimes as a necessity to beat water shortages in many areas around the world. Today, quite a lot of thermal and physical separation technologies are well established in large scale production for domestic and industrial purposes. Membrane distillation is a novel thermally-driven process that can be adapted efficiently for water desalination, due to its prospective lower energy consumption and simplicity.Membrane distillation is a membrane separation process which may overcome some limitations of the other membrane technologies . The membrane distillation process constitutes one of the potential for a new method for water desalination in particular, high solute concentrations can be reached, overcoming concentration polarization phenomenon and ultrapure water can be formed as a permeate. In this process a micro-porous hydrophobic membranes is used , liquid water impermeable to the transport ,only water vapour can be transported through them, having a vapour pressure difference as driving force at the two solutions membrane interface. A variety of polymeric hydrophobic membranes have been prepared with an suitable micro-porosity . The effect of the feed temperature, feed flow rate , cooling water temperature ,cooling water flow rate etc .have been studied theoretically and tested experimentally and also energy consumption. Membrane distillation has shown motivating potential in water desalination,. In addition, the overall performance of the processes can improved .if membrane distillation is integrated with other process to achieve higher concentration standards