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Optimizing Membrane Distillation With Solar Thermal Collectors, Andrew Mason, Ben Shulders, Siamak Nejati
Optimizing Membrane Distillation With Solar Thermal Collectors, Andrew Mason, Ben Shulders, Siamak Nejati
UCARE Research Products
With rising human populations, the demand for freshwater is an ever-growing problem. One emerging technology to combat this problem is membrane distillation (MD). MD has several advantages for water desalination including 100% rejection of solute (salt, heavy metals, etc.) and mergeability with other affordable energy sources (solar heat, electric resistance, etc.) However, at the moment the specific energy consumption (SEC) of MD is very high due to low water production rates and large energy inputs to heat water. In a solar‐assisted design for MD, the high cost of solar collectors (~$200/m2) inhibits the low cost of water production in comparison …