Unveiling the Potential of Solar-Powered Multistage Hollow Fiber WGMD: A Transient Performance Evaluation

Solar-energy-driven membrane distillation provides a sustainable pathway to mitigate freshwater scarcity by utilizing an abundant renewable heat source. This study develops a two-dimensional axisymmetric computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model to simulate the transient performance of a hollow fiber water gap membrane distillation (HF-WGMD) module integrated with flat-plate solar collectors (FPCs). A lumped-parameter transient FPC model is coupled with the CFD framework to predict feed water temperature under time-varying solar irradiation, evaluated across four representative days in a Mediterranean city. The model is validated against experimental data, showing strong agreement. A comprehensive parametric analysis reveals that increasing the collector area from 10 to 50 m2 enhances the average water flux by a factor of 6.4, reaching 10.9 kg/(m2h), while other parameters such as collector width, tube number and working fluid flow rate exert comparatively minor effects. The module flux strongly correlates with solar intensity, achieving a maximum instantaneous value of 18.4 kg/(m2h) with 35 m2 collectors. Multistage HF-WGMD configurations are further investigated, demonstrating substantial reductions in solar energy demand due to internal thermal recovery by the cooling stream. A 40-stage system operating with only 10 m2 of solar collectors achieves an average specific thermal energy consumption of 424 kWh/m3, while the overall solar desalination efficiency improves dramatically from 2.6% for a single-stage system with 50 m2 collectors to 57.5% for the multistage configuration. The proposed system achieves a maximum freshwater productivity of 51.5 kg/day, highlighting the viability and optimization potential of solar-driven HF-WGMD desalination.