Membrane distillation for sustainable wastewater treatment

Membrane distillation (MD) process is a non-isothermal membrane technology, which has been widely used for seawater desalination and water treatment for past 50 years. During the last decade, the MD process opportunities applied to wastewater treatment have also attracted considerable attention. Challenging wastewater streams, such as colored effluent in textile industry, oily wastewater, fruit and dairy processing effluent, phenolic contaminated streams, and refinery/petrochemical wastewater samples, have been successfully treated using different MD configurations. As a result, MD has been playing a dominant role in providing of sustainable, cost-effective, and innovative wastewater treatment technology for a greener approach in water process engineering. Due to its immense potential and versatility, MD has recently shed some light on how we can reduce the risk of challenging wastewater streams. This special issue, titled “VSI: Membrane distillation for wastewater treatment” (SI: MD for WWT), was oriented towards the publication of both recent progress made and future perspectives on the applications of the MD process for wastewater treatment.