Abstract
Currently, technology is increasingly advanced and has penetrated into several fields such as Membrane Distillation (MD) in water treatment, especially to purify saline water, in the face of the increasing scarcity of clean water needed for consumption, both in the domestic, agriculture, and industrial sectors. One of the configurations in MD systems, self-heated Vacuum Membrane Distillation (VMD) system, which employs a Graphene-PVDF membrane heated by power supply, in this case using DC power with low voltage, to eliminate feed pre-feed heating and temperature polarization, is interesting to learn. In addition, to enhance the performances, such as optimizing permeate flux (JW), Temperature Polarization Factor (TPF), Specific Heating Energy (QSH), and Gain Output Ratio (GOR), several different designs are made and compared. In this study, four parameters are selected: DC power supply’s voltage, feed flow rate, the length, and the width of the cell-body’s slot. Ansys FLUENT software is utilized to simulate the system, followed by Minitab software to analyze the results using Response Surface Method (RSM) which aims to achieve the optimal design parameters. The simulation data was validated by experimental data and determination of the optimum conditions of the self-heated VMD system led to the best performances such as maximizing JW, TPF, and GOR, as well as minimizing QSH.