Surface Treatment of Air Gap Membrane Distillation (AGMD) Condensation Plates: Techniques and Influences on Module Performance

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Air Gap Membrane Distillation (AGMD) is one of several technologies that can be used to solve problems fresh water availability. AGMD exhibits several advantages, including low conductive heat loss and higher thermal efficiency, due to the presence of an air gap between the membrane and condensation wall. A previous study by Bhardwaj found that the condensation surface properties (materials and contact angle) affected the total collected fresh water in the solar distillation process. However, the process condition differences between solar distillation and AGMD might result in different condensation phenomena. In contrast, N. Miljkovic showed that a hydrophobic surface has higher condensation heat transfer. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, there is no study that investigates the effect of condensation surface properties in AGMD to overall process performance (i.e. flux and thermal efficiency). Thus, in this study, we treated the AGMD condensation surface to make it hydrophobic or hydrophilic. The condensation surface could be made hydrophilic by immersing and boiling plate in deionized (DI) water, which caused the formation of hydrophilic aluminum hydroxide (AlOOH) nanostructures. Afterwards, the treated plate was coated using hexamethyldisiloxane (HMDSO) through plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD). The result indicated that condensation surface properties do not affect the permeate flux or thermal efficiency significantly. In general, the permeate flux and thermal efficiency for the treated plates were lower than those of the non-treated plate (pristine). However, at a 1 mm and 3 mm air gap, the treated plate outperformed the non-treated plate (pristine) in terms of permeate flux. Therefore, although surface wettability effect was not significant, it still provided a little influence.