Feed seawater heating is one of the crucial bottlenecks in membrane desalination (MD) systems. The interest of usage solar energy techniques for feed seawater preheating in MD systems is recently regarded as an improvement path for sustainable distillate production. This study presents a conceptual design, theoretical modeling, and comprehensive parametric analysis of a tubular direct contact membrane desalination system (TDCMDS) driven by heat pipe-based solar collectors (HPSCs). An improved theoretical model performed in MATLAB software was conducted to simulate the hybrid solar TDCMDS operation in order to analyse its performance in the climate conditions of Tanta, Egypt. The effects of the number of utilized solar collectors, feed seawater flowrate, cooling water flowrate, and utilization of additional electric heaters on the energy performance of the solar TDCMDS are parametrically investigated. The findings show that the number of the utilized solar collectors, feed seawater flowrate, and cooling water flowrate, were the most sensitive to the performance of the solar TDCMDS, which should be desired to be 5.0 $\ge n\ge$ 2.0, 20.0 lpm, and 5.0 lpm, respectively, in the design of the TDCMDS to maximize the freshwater production. Moreover, the maximum permeates flux are 0.45, 0.39, 0.32, and 0.25 kg/h per m² of solar collecting area with total daily freshwater production of 35.0, 24.60, 15.48, and 7.95 kg/day by integrating five, four, three, and two HPSCs connected in series, respectively, compared to only 0.08 kg/h.m² and 1.44 kg/day when coupling one solar collector at feed seawater and cooling water flowrates of 20 and 5.0 lpm, respectively. Conclusively, it can be recommended that this investigation provides an emerging strategy for designing solar-based MD systems.

进料海水加热是膜脱盐 (MD) 系统的关键瓶颈之一。最近将太阳能技术用于 MD 系统中进料海水预热的兴趣被认为是一种改进途径 用于可持续馏分油生产。本研究介绍了由基于热管的太阳能集热器 (HPSC) 驱动的管式直接接触膜海水淡化系统 (TDCMDS) 的概念设计、理论建模和综合参数分析。在 MATLAB 软件中执行改进的理论模型来模拟混合太阳能 TDCMDS 操作，以分析其在埃及坦塔气候条件下的性能。参数化研究了太阳能集热器的使用数量、进给海水流量、冷却水流量和附加电加热器的使用对太阳能 TDCMDS 能源性能的影响。研究结果表明，太阳能集热器的使用数量、进水海水流量和冷却水流量，$\ge n\ge$TDCMDS 的设计分别为 2.0、20.0 lpm 和 5.0 lpm，以最大限度地提高淡水产量。此外，通过整合五、四、三^、和两个串联连接的 HPSC，分别与仅 0.08 kg/hm ²和 1.44 kg/day 相比，当耦合一个太阳能收集器时，进水海水和冷却水流量分别为 20 和 5.0 lpm。最后，可以建议这项调查为设计基于太阳能的 MD 系统提供了一种新兴策略。