This paper presents a study of the combined system of vacuum membrane distillation (VMD) and mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) for the treatment of sulfuric acid solution. A lab-scale VMD setup with polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) microporous membranes using sulfuric acid solution as feed was used to investigate the effects of operating parameters on water production performance. The thermal efficiency in VMD process was then analyzed. Finally, further investigation about the energy recovery characteristic of the proposed system were carried out by analyzing the variation laws of the vapor saturated temperature rise of the compressor. The results showed that sulfuric acid solution could be concentrated up to 50 % by the VMD technology, and the separation efficiency was 99.9 %. However, the energy requirement was still larger due to lower thermal efficiency caused by the heat loss to the environment and the absence of recovery of latent heat of vaporization. The MVR process could achieve the enhancement of energy efficiency in the VMD process by recovering the latent heat of vaporization, the optimum permeate-side absolute pressure under different feed concentrations was obtained, which could ensure the minimum energy consumption, the energy saving of 65.5 % was observed in comparison with the conventional VMD system.

本文介绍了真空膜蒸馏（VMD）和机械蒸汽再压缩（MVR）组合系统处理硫酸溶液的研究。实验室规模的VMD装置使用聚四氟乙烯（PTFE）微孔膜，以硫酸溶液作为原料，用于研究操作参数对水生产性能的影响。然后分析了VMD过程中的热效率。最后，通过分析压缩机蒸汽饱和温升的变化规律，对所提出系统的能量回收特性进行了进一步研究。结果表明，利用VMD技术可以将硫酸溶液浓缩至50％，分离效率为99.9％。然而，由于对环境的热损失以及缺乏汽化潜热的回收而导致的热效率较低，因此能量需求仍然更大。通过回收汽化潜热，MVR工艺可以提高VMD工艺的能效，获得了不同进料浓度下的最佳渗透侧绝对压力，可以保证最小的能耗，节能65.5％。与传统的VMD系统相比，观察到了这种现象。