Among sustainable membrane separation technologies for clean water production, membrane distillation (MD) offers concrete benefits, such as integrating with renewable energies, reducing capital costs, minimizing environmental impact, increasing safety, and using remote control and automation. However, the occurrence of membrane pore wetting in MD has hindered the widespread application of MD. This study performed the first application of a new wetting prevention technique in a full MD setup: maintaining active air layers on an MD membrane surface. This works shows that the presence of the air bubbles on the surface of the superhydrophobic membrane in a direct contact membrane...