A TRNSYS model of a direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) system coupled to a flat plate solar collector (FPC)

Abstract

A promising water desalination system based on direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) powered by flat plate solar collector (FPC) is proposed in the present study. The carried out system is modelized and simulated by using the commercial code TRNSYS. Doing this was possible by including a novel component able to simulate the physical behavior of the DCMD. The simulation of the solar distillation system has been done during the 21st june along a daylight of 10 hours under the meteorological conditions of Ain Témouchent city (Algeria). The results showed that the present model has a good agreement with the experimental data of the literature. The present desalination system allows to get a daily distillate production around 42.86 l/d and the specific daily distillate production rate is 10.85 kg for each m2 of FPC. Furthermore, concerning the performance parameters, it was found that the solar fractions ranged from 0 to1 and the collector efficiencies was assessed 74%.