Currently, climate change is creating many significant impacts on water resources, typically the problem of salty sea water and scarcity of fresh water leading to serious consequences. To solve the shortage of fresh water, Reverse Osmosis – RO technology is considered one of the most widely used solutions because of its high treatment efficiency. However, the biggest disadvantage of this technology is high energy consumption and frequent membrane replacement due to membrane contamination during operation. Meanwhile, the application of membrane distillation (MD) technology in treating seawater into fresh water is still limited because there is no optimal MD membrane and the system design is not highly effective. Therefore, the implementation of the project “Fabrication of Membrane Distilled Membrane and Development of Smart Seawater Filtration System for Coastal Communities using Integrated Membrane Distillation and Solar Energy” is very urgent to solve the problem of lack of fresh water for people in coastal areas, islands and on offshore fishing vessels. The outstanding advantage of this project is integrating membrane distillation technology with solar energy to help minimize energy use and aim for net-zero emission by 2050 (Cop 27, 2022).
The main goal of the research is to synthesize MD membranes that are superhydrophobic, achieve high permeation efficiency, great mechanical endurance and minimal membrane wetting. At the same time, the project focuses on designing and optimizing the parameters of a smart seawater purifier to minimize operating costs. It is hoped that the project will contribute an important part in preparing the Environmental Technology research group at Da Lat University (DLU) in developing and widely applying membrane distillation technology and sea water purifier to convert sea water into fresh water in the future.
