Full-scale membrane distillation systems and performance improvement through modeling: A review

This chapter highlights the current advances of membrane distillation (MD) in full-scale implementations. It also covers the modeling aspects that are beneficial for the commercial assessment of MD systems. Therefore, the objective of this chapter is to present a review of the commercial and full-scale evaluation operations in recent MD plants through which the features of those operations are also discussed. Most of the commercial and full-scale MD facilities employ vacuum and air gap membrane distillation to avoid the loss of heat of conduction to the membrane resulting in reduced temperature-gradient driving force. The optimization of commercial MD operations through modeling is also proposed, by presenting a detailed overview of recent MD modeling and recommendations for dynamic modeling.