A review on fouling of membrane distillation

Abstract

A B S T R A C TMembrane distillation (MD) has been developed for the past 40 years. Nevertheless, only in recent times, MD technology has shown substantial progress, including the development of a few commercial systems. In this study, a comprehensive review is carried out on the application of MD for the production of drinking water. Based on a broad perspective, this review describes the applications of MD for drinking water production, its advantages, and limitations. Specifically, this review focuses on the scaling and organic fouling phenomena in MD for drinking water production as one of the major challenge to MD implementation. The fouling and wetting phenomena in MD is discussed in detail as well as fouling detection methods, the influence of feed solution characteristics, and operational parameters on MD fouling and related areas requiring future investigations. The study highlights a number of approaches on fouling reduction in MD.

PDMS/PVDF hybrid electrospun membrane with superhydrophobic property and drop impact dynamics for dyeing wastewater treatment using membrane distillation

“…The development of an ideal membrane, which is strong against wetting and fouling, will enable the MD to apply prominently in wastewater treatment [4]. Dyeing wastewater is produced in large amounts and its treatment is riddled with complexities due to the inherent coloring and the multitude of chemicals used during the textile process.…”

Mining valuable minerals from seawater: a critical review

“…Under such conditions, the supersaturated brines may result in scaling formation specifically gypsum (CaSO 4 ·2H 2 O) which has an inverse solubility under thermal conditions. 72 This tends to disrupt the MDC's operation. For instance, prior to the recovery of NaCl and MgSO 4 through MDC, Ca was removed as CaCO 3 by adding Na 2 CO 3 to prevent gypsum scaling on the membrane's surface.…”

“…Further, at high water recovery, the significant effect of polarization and increased resistance to vapour transport within the membrane pores would limit the performance of MD and MDC. 72 3.3.4 Advantages. MDC provides the opportunity to simultaneously produce high quality fresh water while concentrating and producing salts/minerals compared to ED and the evaporation method.…”

Effect of membrane properties and operational parameters on systems for seawater desalination using computational fluid dynamics simulations

“…This reduction does not account for the effect of fouling over the membrane. Fouling will reduce the water flux and cause membrane degradation over a longer period of operation [46]. Hence, it is still vital to mitigate concentration polarization to reduce the chance of fouling over the membrane surface [2].…”