• Membrane and Water Treatment
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• 제13권1호
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• pp.51-62
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• 2022

Vacuum-assisted air gap membrane distillation (V-AGMD) has the potential to achieve higher flux and productivity than conventional air gap membrane distillation (AGMD). Nevertheless, there is not much information on technical aspects of V-AGMD operation. Accordingly, this study aims to analyze the effect of membrane deformation on flux in V-AGMD operation. Experiments were carried out using a bench-scale V-AGMD system. Statistical models were applied to understand the flux behaviors. Statistical models based on MLR, GNN, and MLFNN techniques were developed to describe the experimental data. Results showed that the flux increased by up to 4 times with the application of vacuum in V-AGMD compared with conventional AGMD. The flux in both AGMD and V-AGMD is affected by the difference between the air gap pressure and the saturation pressure of water vapor, but their dependences were different. In V-AGMD, the membranes were found to be deformed due to the vacuum pressure because they were not fully supported by the spacer. As a result, the deformation reduced the effective air gap width. Nevertheless, the rejection and LEP were not changed even if the deformation occurred. The flux behaviors in V-AGMD were successfully interpreted by the GNN and MLFNN models. According to the model calculations, the relative impact of the membrane deformation ranges from 10.3% to 16.1%.