ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a new membrane distillation (MD) membrane design via an electrospinning technique. It summarizes the updates of the potential of nanofiber membranes for MD application, including the details on various strategies for nanofiber membrane fabrication. The chapter suggests future outlooks to improve membrane performances in MD, to reduce total costs of the fabrication. The electrospun membranes can provide very large specific surface area, high porosity, and high degree of interconnection, which make them very suitable for MD process. Moreover, the properties of an electrospun membrane, including its thickness, pore size, and porosity, can be controlled by changing the parameters in the electrospinning process. The membrane thickness has a significant effect on water flux performance, which then determines the mass transfer resistance. Generally, a low water permeate flux is caused by an increased mass transfer resistance due to the increased thickness of a membrane.
