Membrane flux response technology for early warning of initial surface scaling in membrane distillation

Membrane distillation (MD) is a promising green separation technology for the treatment of high salinity wastewater attributed to excellent salt rejection, which is significant in relevant environmental and chemical engineering application. However, membrane scaling is an inevitable issue during long-term membrane distillation process. Thus, we developed a membrane flux response technology with data processing method to in-situ monitor the membrane scaling according to the reduction of permeate flux. By real-time analyzing the derivative of deviation between theoretical and experimental fluxes, early warning of initial membrane surface scaling was observed at initial nucleation stage. Besides, such timely detection was also achieved under different temperatures and flow velocities of feed solution, even for the poor light transmittance aqueous solution (such as NiSO4 and CoSO4 solution), which exhibited wide application potential on diverse high salinity wastewater systems. In addition, the metastable zone width of salt solution within MD system was obtained for the efficient operation design. To sum up, membrane flux response technology provides an early warning at imminent membrane scaling, which will maintain the great separation effect for a fresh feed solution after a facile cleaning by pure water, indicating the extension of device lifetime.