A commercially available microporous polypropylene hollow fiber membranes were employed for air gap and water gap membrane distillation (i.e., AGMD and WGMD, respectively) processes. In both configurations, the outer surface of commercially available dense polypropylene hollow fibers was used as the condensing surface of the permeate. The performance levels of the AGMD and WGMD processes utilizing microporous polyvinylidene fluoride membranes fabricated in-house were compared with those using polypropylene membranes. Under the given specific operating conditions, the maximum mean permeation flux values in AGMD and WGMD using polypropylene hollow fiber membranes were approximately 24 and 27 kg/m²h, respectively. In addition, theoretical studies on AGMD and WGMD using the designed hollow fiber module configuration were performed. The predicted results were found to well agree with the experimental results, thus verifying their validity. Moreover, parametric studies were conducted to identify the optimum evaporation-to-condensation surface area ratio (i.e., optimum numbers of hollow fiber membranes and hollow fiber condensers) in terms of specific energy consumption.

市售的微孔聚丙烯中空纤维膜用于气隙和水隙膜蒸馏（即分别为 AGMD 和 WGMD）过程。在这两种配置中，市售的致密聚丙烯中空纤维的外表面用作渗透物的冷凝表面。将使用内部制造的微孔聚偏二氟乙烯膜的 AGMD 和 WGMD 工艺的性能水平与使用聚丙烯膜的工艺进行了比较。在给定的特定操作条件下，使用聚丙烯中空纤维膜的 AGMD 和 WGMD 的最大平均渗透通量值约为 24 和 27 kg/m ²h，分别。此外，使用设计的中空纤维模块配置对 AGMD 和 WGMD 进行了理论研究。发现预测结果与实验结果非常吻合，从而验证了其有效性。此外，还进行了参数研究，以确定在特定能耗方面的最佳蒸发与冷凝表面积比（即中空纤维膜和中空纤维冷凝器的最佳数量）。