Professor Meriem Laleg's research on membrane distillation modeling for desalination published in Desalination
An accurate mathematical model is proposed to describe an emerging desalination technology called direct contact membrane distillation system. The mathematical model is important for designing efficient control and monitoring strategies, a crucial step to facilitate the commercialization of this technology.
About
- They propose a dynamic model for direct contact membrane distillation process.
- Both transient and steady-state phases are well represented with this model.
- The model is given by an advection-diffusion equation.
- The model has been validated with experimental data.
This work proposes a mathematical dynamic model for the direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) process. The model is based on a 2D Advection-Diffusion Equation (ADE), which describes the heat and mass transfer mechanisms that take place inside the DCMD module. The model studies the behavior of the process in the time-varying and the steady-state phases, contributing to understanding the process performance, especially when it is driven by intermittent energy supply, such as solar energy. The model is experimentally validated in the steady-state phase, where the permeate flux is measured for different feed inlet temperatures and the maximum absolute error recorded is 2.78°C. Moreover, experimental validation includes the time variation phase, where the feed inlet temperature ranges from 30°C to 75°C with 0.1°C increment every 2min. The validation marks relative error to be less than 5%, which leads to a strong correlation between the model predictions and the experiments.