Wastewater from textile dyeing plants contains a complex mixture of dyes, salts, surfactants and other additives which make it challenging to treat and harmful to release directly into the water system. Current treatment technologies are composed of many steps, increasing the cost and complexity of water management. Air gap membrane distillation (AGMD) is a versatile water treatment process which has potential to reduce the complexity of textile dyeing wastewater but has not yet been investigated for this application. In this work, we used commercial polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) membranes in AGMD to recover pure water from simulated textile wastewater containing NaCl and either sunset yellow (SY) or rose bengal (RB) dyes and sodium dodecyle sulfate (SDS) surfactant. 100% salt and colour removal was achieved for binary feed solutions (NaCl + SY or RB) over 20 h of testing, whilst maintaining stable fluxes between 11.7 and 12.6 L m⁻² h⁻¹ (LMH) throughout. After 24 h of continuous testing of the ternary feed solution (NaCl + RB + SDS) the flux was as high as 11 LMH with permeate conductivity less than 50 µS cm⁻¹. However after 70 h these had reached ∼3 LMH and 421.8 µS cm⁻¹, respectively indicating a need for cleaning or back-flushing between batches. Parallel direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) tests achieved lower colour and total carbon removal after just 8 h of testing with the ternary feed solution. Comparisons between our tests and those found in the literature are made and indicate that AGMD may be the most suitable configuration for this application due to reduced flux decline and potentially higher thermal efficiency.

纺织印染厂产生的废水包含染料，盐，表面活性剂和其他添加剂的复杂混合物，这给处理带来了挑战，并且有害地直接排放到水系统中。当前的处理技术由许多步骤组成，这增加了水管理的成本和复杂性。气隙膜蒸馏（AGMD）是一种通用的水处理工艺，具有降低纺织印染废水复杂性的潜力，但尚未对此应用进行过研究。在这项工作中，我们使用了AGMD中的商用聚四氟乙烯（PTFE）膜从含有NaCl和日落黄色（SY）或玫瑰红（RB）染料和十二烷基硫酸钠（SDS）表面​​活性剂的模拟纺织废水中回收纯净水。始终为^-2  h ^-1（LMH）。在对三元进料溶液（NaCl + RB + SDS）进行连续测试24小时后，通量高达11 LMH，渗透电导率小于50 µS cm ^-1。然而，在70小时后，它们分别达到了约3 LMH和421.8 µS cm ^-1，表明批次之间需要清洁或反冲洗。用三元进料溶液进行仅8小时的测试后，平行直接接触膜蒸馏（DCMD）测试获得了较低的颜色和总碳去除率。我们的测试与文献中的测试进行了比较，结果表明，由于磁通量下降和潜在的更高的热效率，AGMD可能是最适合此应用的配置。