Solar Membrane Distillation for Desalination: A Review

Desalination of saline water is becoming necessary and a competitive solution to drinking water scarcity problem. This paper covers an extensive review about solar powered membrane distillation process with an introductory information about different types of membranes and membrane modules, also about various thermal distillation processes, principle and working of the process, energy requirement and exergy analysis of the processes, design of the process, economic analysis and evaluation of process. This method is a viable in remote areas, arid region or countries on the solar belt like the Middle East, India, and China etc(specifically those near a saline water body). To solve the scarcity problem in 2013 there were 14000 desalination plants all over the world and 57% were in the Middle East and the Gulf region, these desalination plants work on conventional procedure by consumption of fuel which led to overconsumption of fuel. Therefore use of renewable energy source became a necessity to reduce overconsumption of fuel and reduce pollution due to emission of gases on fuel burning. This method of solar desalination using membrane distillation helps in reducing the operational cost by reducing consumption of fossil fuels which are replaced by photovoltaic cell or thermal collector for heating the feed solution.