Treatment of high-salinity brine containing dissolved organic matters by vacuum membrane distillation: A fouling mitigation approach via microbubble aeration

In this study, a laboratory-scale vacuum membrane distillation (VMD) system coupled with microbubble aeration (MBA) was developed for the treatment of high-salinity brine containing organic matters. Herein, at the beginning, feedwater only containing model organics such as humic acid (HA), bovine serum albumin (BSA) and sodium alginate (SA) was utilized to investigate the organic-fouling behavior, results indicated that the permeate flux was not affected by a thin and loose contaminated layer deposited on the membrane surface. Furthermore, dissolved organics in the feed brine inhibited the occurrence of membrane wetting due to the existence of a compact and protective crystals/organic-fouling layer, which can prevent the intrusion of scaling ions into membrane substrates. Besides, organics in the feedwater have a high tendency to adsorb on the membrane surface based on molecular dynamics simulations, thus, forming an organic-fouling layer prior to inorganic scaling. Finally, the effect of MBA on fouling alleviation was evaluated in VMD system, nearly 50% of salt precipitation from fouled membrane was effectively removed with the introduction of MBA, which can be ascribed to a combination of mechanisms, including surface shear forces and electrostatic attractions induced by microbubbles, meanwhile, about 2.2% of the total energy was only consumed, when using MBA. Together, these results demonstrated that MBA was a promising approach to alleviate membrane fouling in VMD. •A laboratory-scale VMD-MBA system was prepared to mitigate the combined fouling.•The dissolved organics tended to adsorb on the membrane surface based on molecular dynamics simulations.•Microbubbles enhanced the performance of VMD desalination.•MBA was a practical approach for fouling control in VMD.