Study of vacuum membrane distillation coupled with solar energy

Vacuum Membrane Distillation (VMD) is an emerging technology for the desalination of sea and brackish water to cope with the growing lack of drinking water in the world. This thermal process, which has the advantage of being able to couple it with solar energy, attracts great attention to produce drinking water at low energy costs. During this work, we carried out a theoretical modelling of different elements of our seawater desalination plant coupled with solar energy, followed by a numerical simulation of its operation. This simulation allowed us to study the impact of solar energy on the process performance of vacuum membrane distillation which give us a gain about 69% of permeate flow.