Abstract
This study investigates the effect of membrane properties porosity, membrane thickness, and pore radius- on the performance of vacuum membrane distillation (VMD) process by achieving computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations on a three-dimensional domain of interest at fixed flow properties. The finite volume method (FVM) is adopted to solve momentum, solute mass transport, and energy equations in the feed channel. To accurately predict the rate of water vapor diffused through the membrane by Knudsen and viscous diffusion mechanism, local concentration, temperature, and flux are coupled at the membrane surfaces. In accordance with the flux, corresponding gradients for temperature and concentration are applied at the membrane boundaries. Since there is a strong coupling of flow properties at the membrane surface, the employed model is validated against an experimental study and further used to characterize the effect of PTFE membrane properties on permeate flux, temperature polarization, and concentration polarization. We found that different set of membrane design parameters substantially changes the total mass flux. The contribution of both viscous and Knudsen mechanism is comparable and, as such, prevents us neglecting neither of them. The temperature and concentration polarization are even more undesirable level for the larger pore sizes.