A techno-economic review of emerging membrane contactor technologies for environmental applications: Performance, limitations, and future directions

초록

Membrane contactors (MCs) have emerged as a core platform in environmental engineering by enabling high mass transfer efficiency, modular flexibility, and operational sustainability with low energy demand. This review consolidates quantitative outcomes across water treatment, gas recovery, and carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) by benchmarking operating cost contributors and potential relative to conventional processes. For disinfection, MC-based ozonation can reduce the energy demand for ozone injection while enhancing ozone mass transfer. Long-term deployment is constrained by ozone-induced damage, highlighting the need for ozonestable membranes. The water production cost of membrane distillation (MD) remains higher than that of reverse osmosis (RO), but MD becomes more competitive when waste heat is available. Further work on scale-up and scaling control is needed to enable reliable long-term deployment. For methane recovery, pumping and vacuum control dominate operating costs, and net energy value is limited under realistic recovery and conversion efficiencies. Future research should focus on improving anti-fouling performance against organics in wastewater and higher-value utilization pathway for the methane. Chemical and operation and maintenance (O&M) costs largely govern the overall economics in ammonia recovery. Net benefit can be improved by lowering chemical consumption and O&M costs via recyclable chemicals, vacuum operation, and swelling-resistant membranes. In CCUS, solvent regeneration is the main cost bottleneck, and MC-based absorption and desorption can reduce energy demand and reliance on CO2 compression. Overall, this review outlines key challenges and future directions to translate current performance into durable and cost-credible deployment across environmental applications.

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