Produced water treatment: Application of Air Gap Membrane Distillation Original Research Article

Air Gap Membrane Distillation (AGMD) has been implemented to treat produced water. The permeate fluxes, rejection factor and energy consumption for three different membranes, TF200, TF450 and TF1000, with pore sizes of 0.2, 0.45 and 1 μm, respectively, are measured at different operating parameters. The influence of membrane pore size is investigated for the produced water. Also, the effect of feed flow rate, coolant temperature and feed temperature on permeate flux is studied. The flux increases as the feed temperature and flow rate increase, and declines as the coolant temperatures increase. Moreover, the energy consumption was measured at different pore size and was found to be independent of membrane pore size.