Water Treatment by Renewable Energy-Driven Membrane Distillation

Abstract One of the rapidly advancing areas in water treatment is membrane distillation which is a hybrid separation process, enjoying thermal evaporation and membrane separation advantages simultaneously. Recently, by the rapid progress in membrane science, membrane distillation has attracted a surge of interest in academia by numerous experimentalists and theoreticians. The highlight of membrane distillation technique is the potential to implement as a renewable energy-driven operating system, mostly solar and geothermal energy. This is an intelligent approach to mitigate the energy consumption of the process since water scarcity coincides with the abundant of solar and geothermal power in many arid and semi-arid areas. This chapter covers membrane distillation principles and its major characteristics as well as presenting a state-of-the-art review on integrating membrane distillation technique with solar collectors and geothermal technology for water treatment applications.