Economic Design of Solar-Driven Membrane Distillation Systems for Desalination.

Solar-driven membrane distillation (SDMD) for desalination is a feasible method to solve water and energy resource issues. The design and operation of SDMD is different from continuous and steady state processes, such as common chemical plants, due to the intermittent and unpredictive characteristics of solar radiation. Employing the steady state and dynamic simulation models developed on the platform of Aspen Custom Modeler, this paper presents a two-stage design approach for the SDMD systems using different types of membrane distillation configurations, including AGMD (air gap MD), DCMD (direct contract MD) and VMD (vacuum MD).