Membrane distillation: solar and waste heat driven demonstration plants for desalination

Abstract

The world's arid and semi-arid zones are already faced with massive water scarcity, which is prospected to increase in the upcoming decades. Therefore the demand for desalination technologies is increasing rapidly. The development of medium size, autonomous and robust desalination units is needed to establish an independent water supply in remote areas. This is the motivation for research on alternative desalination processes. Membrane distillation (MD) seems to meet the specific requirements very well. The robust membrane allows it to follow alternating operation conditions given by e.g. solar energy. The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) has been working on the development of energy self- sufficient desalination systems based on solar driven MD technology since 2001. The focus is on module and system development. This work is focused on experimental studies on full scale demonstration systems, utilizing a parallel multi MD-module setup. The according MD technology background and module set up is presented in this conference in the paper “SPIRAL WOUND MODULES FOR MEMBRANE DISTILLATION: MODELLING, VALIDATION AND MODULE OPTIMIZATION” by D. Winter. From 2004-2008 different autonomous solar driven MD systems, covering a capacity range from 80 to 2000 liters/day, have been developed, installed and monitored. Simulation tools have been developed and validated with the data from pilot plant operation. As shown in figure 1 two different system configurations for different capacity ranges were developed