Membrane condenser configurations for water recovery from waste gases

Aim of the present paper is to investigate and compare the performance of three different possible membrane condenser configurations in terms of amount of recovered liquid water and energy consumption. Membrane condenser is an innovative unit operation utilized for the recovery of evaporated waste water from industrial gases. In the first proposed configuration, the fed waste gas is cooled by cooling water before entering the membrane module; in the second configuration the cooling is obtained inside the membrane module through a cold sweeping gas; the third configuration is in between the two previous ones: the fed waste gas is first partially cooled via an external medium and then a sweeping gas is used for the final cooling of the stream. The achieved results indicate that configuration 2 has the lowest energy consumption, and configuration 3 allows achieving the highest water recovery whereas its energy consumption is in between configuration 1 and 2.