Pore Wetting in Desalination of Brine Using Membrane Distillation Process
type: CreativeWork
description: It goes without saying that water scarcity is a widespread and increasingly pressing global challenge. One of the methods which can mitigate water shortage is to increase freshwater production via desalination of saline waters. Seawater and saline aquifer sources represent 97.5% of all water on Earth. Hence, treating even a small portion of saline water could significantly reduce water shortage. Although reverse osmosis is one of the state-of-the-art pressure-driven membrane desalination technologies, it is incapable of desalinating high-salinity streams due to the very high osmotic pressure to overcome. Membrane distillation (MD) is one of the emerging methods, which has attracted much attention for desalinating highly saline brines. MD is a thermally driven process in which only vapor molecules pass through the pores of a microporous hydrophobic membrane. This process, however, has not been fully commercialized due to a number of challenges, including “pore wetting”. Pore wetting refers to the presence of liquid, instead of just water vapor, inside the membrane pores, which may cause a decrease in MD flux and/or deterioration of distillate quality. Herein, a comprehensive review on pore wetting is presented, and then this phenomenon is investigated from four aspects. In the first phase of this project, a theoretical model is presented according to which the pore size distribution of membrane, a parameter affecting pore wetting risk, is estimated by employing only a few experimental data points in accordance with the wet/dry method, reducing the number of data required to be recorded largely. In the next phase, an equation is presented for the estimation of liquid entry pressure (LEP), a membrane parameter closely related to pore wetting, using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools and genetic programming (GP) as an intelligent technique. This equation can estimate LEP in closer agreement to experimental values in comparison to the Young-Laplace equation. In the…
abstract: It goes without saying that water scarcity is a widespread and increasingly pressing global challenge. One of the methods which can mitigate water shortage is to increase freshwater production via desalination of saline waters. Seawater and saline aquifer sources represent 97.5% of all water on Earth. Hence, treating even a small portion of saline water could significantly reduce water shortage. Although reverse osmosis is one of the state-of-the-art pressure-driven membrane desalination technologies, it is incapable of desalinating high-salinity streams due to the very high osmotic pressure to overcome. Membrane distillation (MD) is one of the emerging methods, which has attracted much attention for desalinating highly saline brines. MD is a thermally driven process in which only vapor molecules pass through the pores of a microporous hydrophobic membrane. This process, however, has not been fully commercialized due to a number of challenges, including “pore wetting”. Pore wetting refers to the presence of liquid, instead of just water vapor, inside the membrane pores, which may cause a decrease in MD flux and/or deterioration of distillate quality. Herein, a comprehensive review on pore wetting is presented, and then this phenomenon is investigated from four aspects. In the first phase of this project, a theoretical model is presented according to which the pore size distribution of membrane, a parameter affecting pore wetting risk, is estimated by employing only a few experimental data points in accordance with the wet/dry method, reducing the number of data required to be recorded largely. In the next phase, an equation is presented for the estimation of liquid entry pressure (LEP), a membrane parameter closely related to pore wetting, using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools and genetic programming (GP) as an intelligent technique. This equation can estimate LEP in closer agreement to experimental values in comparison to the Young-Laplace equation. In the…
author: Chamani, Hooman
language: en
keywords: Pore Wetting, Membrane Distillation, Desalination, Modeling
date published: 2021-11-22T20:55:34Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:39:16Z
provider: University of Ottawa
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/10393/42946

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.20381/ruor-27163