Brine producing industries progressively become the centre of attentionas they carry greater environmental consequences. Despite the extensiveliterature that can be found on desalination, limited information is availableabout the practical comparison of the technologies with regards to the brineconcentration performance and associated energy consumption. This thesis studyaims to contribute to bridging this knowledge gap by comparing reverse osmosis(RO), electrodialysis (ED) and vacuum membrane distillation (VMD). RO wasstudied by simulations using WAVE software, while ED and VMD were studied byperforming lab-scale experiments. Feed NaCl concentrationsbetween 20 and 80 g/L were considered in this study. The achievedconcentration factor (CF) for RO was greatly influenced by the feedconcentration. It was found that applying higher netdriving pressures resulted in higher recoveries, but recoveries are limited by feed concentration. In the VMDstudy, the correlation between operating temperatures and permeate flux wasfound to be positive. A decrease in permeate flux wasobserved with increasing solute content, which is related to the vapourpressure lowering phenomena. It was found that the effect of operatingtemperature on permeate flux is greater than the effect of the feedconcentration. Condensation contributed to the highest energy consumption(81%), followed by the vacuum pump (18.9%). Efficient heating andcooling pumps result in a significant energy consumption decrease. In the ED study it was found that applying different current density (CD) did not influence the CF, so it ismore advantageous to apply lower CD to achieve the same desalination from anenergy saving point of view. Furthermore, the CF decreased with increasing feedconcentration and thistrend intensifies with larger volume ratios. The effectof absolute water transport became more significant at higher feedconcentrations and resulted in overall dilution of the concentrate stream. Thedistribution of mass transport was similar for different volume ratios, meaningthat higher CF can be achieved by larger volume ratios. Higher energy consumptionwas related to higher feed concentration and higher volume ratios resulted in higherenergy consumption due to smaller concentrate volume.RO, VMD and ED proved to be suitabletechnologies for concentrating different NaCl solutions. RO and ED showed verysimilar concentration performance and energy consumption. The concentration limit for RO was 118g/L, while for ED it was 140 g/L. RO was able to achieve higher CF with lowerenergy consumption at concentrations < 60 g/L, compared to ED. EDoutperforms RO at concentrations > 60 g/L. Theenergy consumption of ED and RO can be reduced by applying a multi-stageconfiguration. The VMD results showed that the energy consumptionto achieve a similar CF as RO and ED, increased by a factor of 61. VMD is moreadvantageous at higher feed concentrations and even more so with waste heat. VMD and RO are suitable for cases that require high qualitypermeate whereas ED is not. The technologies could also be applied togetherto minimize waste production, whilst prioritizing concentration.