Review and assessment of the newly developed MD for desalination processes

Although reverse osmosis (RO) is a membrane seperation process which leads to the desalination market for both seawater and brackish water desalination, other newly developed membranes processes are emerging to be well applicable for the production of fresh water by desalination. The newly developed membrane processes such as membrane distillation (MD) and forward osmosis (FO) claim to have the potential to strongly be competitive to the commercial RO. MD and FO are now under development either on a pilot test unit's scale or small-sized commercial units. This paper presents a technical review and assessment of MD, and addresses the latest development in MD configurations, membranes, integration with other processes and the process modeling