Materials (Jul 2024)

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

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/ma17153629
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 17, no. 15
p. 3629

Abstract

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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.

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