Studies on Membrane Distillation for Value Recovery and Mitigation of Thermal Pollution

Abstract

Growing environmental issues and the need for pure water necessitate a change, in how spent industrial streams are handled, both aqueous and gaseous streams. The ideal solution would be to get back the contaminated species or wasted energy as value be it water or waste heat or chemicals, leading to reduction in environmental burden, besides providing value addition: a win win situation. Several studies have been reported in the efficient utilization of waste heat, present in exhaust gases as well as hot aqueous discharges for a variety of desalination processes, such as low temperature multiple effect distillation (LT-MED), humidification-dehumidification (HDH) process etc. The economic and logistical constraints have restricted their wide-spread applications. newlineIn recent years, the membrane processes, which have various inherent advantages such as compactness, easy operability, and low specific energy requirements, have opened many doors for recovering value and making the process environmental-friendly newline