Designing and Simulation of Continuous Direct Contact Membrane Distillation Process in Aspen Hysys

Recently, the interest of membrane distillation (md) process is increasing worldwide for desalination plants due to treat highly concentrated solutions# in current study, a continuous direct contact md process to achieve desired recovery factor by using pvdf membrane is simulated# the design of the plant comprises multiple md stages connected in series to achieve the set recovery factor of 40%# the simulation of this plant was performed by linking matlab and aspen hysys software# the effect of operating and design conditions such as feed temperature and number of fiber, respectively, on key performance parameters including energy consumption, membrane area requirements, thermal efficiency, pressure drop, transmembrane flux and number of stages has been investigated# in this study, three different cases were investigated and the result indicated that by increasing the feed temperature from 70 to 80 °c , the total required membrane area and the thermal energy decreased from 370 to 266 m2 and from 44#937×106 to 42×106 kj/h, respectively# also as the number of fibers increased from 3800 to 400, the total required membrane area and the thermal energy decreased to 364 m2 and 42#856×106 kj/h, respectively#