Experimental Study for Water Desalination by Low-Pressure Membranes: Air Gap Membrane Distillation.

Document Type : Research Studies

Authors

1 Chemical Engineering Department, El-Minia University 2011

2 Consultant Head of Water Sector Suez Canal Authority

3 Mechanical Power Eng. Dept., Faculty of Engineering, Mansoura University.

4 Mechanical Power Eng. Dept Faculty of Engineering Mansoura University

Abstract

Water desalination became very important process because of the leakage in clean water sources and the increase of human demand. This paper introduces an experimental study for air gab membrane desalination process AGMD using low pressure membrane type. The experimental unit was designed and fabricated according to the data collected from the literature review. The unit used experimentally is a double feed desalination unit. The study consists of two categories: the first one studies desalination unit as a parallel feed unit, the two feed have the same temperature, the second one studies desalination unit as a forward feed unit, the feed to second stage is the recycled outlet of first stage.
Experimental study shows that the most effecting parameters in AGMD are; inlet feed temperature, inlet feed velocity, inlet coolant temperature and inlet coolant velocity. The optimum operating conditions to get maximum permeate flux according to experimental results are; inlet feed temperature of 70 0C, inlet feed velocity of 0.8 m/s, inlet coolant temperature of 15 0C, inlet coolant velocity of 0.65 m/s. As increasing temperature and velocity lead to increase in cost compared with the amount of product. Using the previous operating conditions lead to permeate flux amount of 55.657 L/m2h from each feed chamber, total permeate flux of 110 L/m2h, when operating the unit as parallel feed. The operating time of the unit was 50 h. In the recycled feed method, the maximum permeate flux was found to be 100 L/m2h from the two chambers together

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