Journal of Fundamentals of Renewable Energy and Applications
Open Access

Abstract

Numerical Investigations of Coupling a Vacuum Membrane Desalination System with a Salt Gradient Solar Pond

Samira Ben Abdallah, Nader Frikha and Slimane Gabsi

This work proposes new configurations for the desalination of salt water using systems based on coupling of membrane distillation with solar energy. This study is a comparison between two coupling configurations of the vacuum membrane distillation (VMD) hollow fiber module with salinity gradient solar pond (SGSP). The first configuration is a module membrane in series with SGSP and the second one is a hollow fiber module immersed in the SGSP. Two models describing the heat and mass transfer in the hollow fiber module and in the SGSP will be developed. The coupling of the two models allows the determination of the instantaneous variation of temperature and salinity in the SGSP and the permeate flow variation. A comparison of each module production was carried out. The mathematical model shows that the immersed module production presents more than one and a half times that of the separated module, their production reached 75 kg.day^-1 per m² of the membrane in the third year. Thus, immersing the module in the solar pond improves the performance of the hollow fiber module.