Mathematical Modeling of NaCl Scaling Development in Long-Distance Membrane Distillation for Improved Scaling Control
Jingcheng Cai,
Xingsen Mu,
Jian Xue,
Jiaming Chen,
Zeman Liu,
Fei Guo
Affiliations
Jingcheng Cai
School of Energy and Power Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China
Xingsen Mu
School of Energy and Power Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China
Jian Xue
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Green Chemical Product Technology, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, China
Jiaming Chen
School of Energy and Power Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China
Zeman Liu
School of Energy and Power Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China
Fei Guo
School of Energy and Power Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China
Membrane distillation is a novel membrane-based separation technology with the potential to produce pure water from high-salinity brine. It couples transport behaviors along the membrane and across the membrane. The brine in the feed is gradually concentrated due to the permeate flux across the membrane, which is a significant factor in initiating the scaling behavior on the membrane surface along the feed flow direction. It is of great interest to investigate and estimate the development of scaling on the membrane surface. This work specifically focuses on a long-distance membrane distillation process with a sodium chloride solution as the feed. A modeling approach has been developed to estimate the sodium chloride scaling development on the membrane surface along the flow direction. A set of experiments was conducted to validate the results. Based on mathematical simplification and analytical fitting, a simplified model was summarized to predict the initiating position of sodium chloride scaling on the membrane, which is meaningful for scaling control in industrial-scale applications of membrane distillation.
