Daily transient analysis of an integrated solar-driven direct contact membrane distillation for cogeneration production of freshwater and electricity

The rapid expansion of the world’s population has made access to adequate freshwater supplies one of the most urgent global challenges. In response, the present work introduces a novel desalination system that couples a direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) unit with a photovoltaic-thermal (PVT) collector, enabling simultaneous production of purified water and electricity from solar energy alone. The PVT collector integrates a photovoltaic panel with a thermal collector to simultaneously generate electricity and heat. The proposed system is transiently analyzed using Engineering Equation Solver (EES) software. This study investigates the effects of the PVT collector tilt angle and reflector inclination angles on system performance. Additionally, to gain a deeper understanding of system behavior and the influence of various design parameters, the impacts of collector area and coolant flow rate through the PVT module are examined. The results demonstrate that increasing the solar collector area has a positive effect on freshwater production, whereas increasing the coolant flow rate through the PVT module exhibits a negative impact on distillate yield. The overall energy efficiency of the system and the energy efficiency of the PVT collector are found to be 36.01% and 43.44%, respectively. Under baseline conditions, the proposed system produces 18.70 kg/day of.