Engineering Commons^™

Nanofluids Improve Energy Efficiency Of Membrane Distillation, Harsharaj B. Parmar, Hamid Fattahi Juybari, Yashwant S. Yogi, Sina Nejati, Ryan M. Jacob, Prashant S. Menon, David M. Warsinger

School of Mechanical Engineering Faculty Publications

Thermal desalination of high salinity water resources is crucial for increasing freshwater supply, but efficiency enhancements are badly needed. Nanomaterial enhancements offer enormous potential for improving promising technologies like membrane distillation (MD). However, while many approaches have been tried, such as nanoparticle solar absorbers or nanomaterial membranes, there have not been studies to directly enhance the fluid properties in MD; via nanofluids. In this work, we examine nanofluids for gap-based MD systems, including the role of nanoscale physics and system-level energy efficiency enhancements. Our model includes the dominant micro-mixing from Brownian motion in fine particle nanofluids (copper oxide) and the …