The construction of rough and porous hydrophobic membrane surface is expected to overcome the obstaclesincluding low permeate water flux and membrane pore wetting which greatly restrict the developmentof membrane distillation (MD) technology. In this study, a rough and porouspolytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) powder-embedded polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) hydrophobic coatinglayer was compounded on the outer surface of PVDF hollow fiber support membrane by the dilute solutioncoating-phase inversion method. PVDF hollow fiber support membrane was fabricated by the dry-jetwet-spinning technique. PTFE powder was directly incorporated in PVDF dilute coating solution andembedded in the porous PVDF coating layer after the nonsolvent induced phase separation (NIPS). Thevariations of membrane morphology, surface chemical compositions, hydrophobicity and wetting resistancewere investigated by scanning electron microscope (SEM), Attenuated total reflection-Fouriertransform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR), dynamic water contact angle (WCA) and liquid entry pressure(LEP) analysis. Membrane separation performance including desalination and ionic dyes removalproperties was evaluated by VMD experiment. Compared with PVDF hollow fiber support membrane,both the surface hydrophobicity and the water permeability of the PTFE powder-embedded PVDF hollowfiber composite membrane (HFC) had obvious improvement. The surface WCA and permeate water fluxincreased from 92.6 and 11.3 kg/m2.h for PVDF support membrane to 133.6 and 26.8 kg/m2.h for thePTFE powder-embedded HFC membrane meanwhile NaCl rejection can be maintained above 99.9%(3.5 wt% NaCl aqueous solution at 50 C and permeate pressure at 31.3 kPa). The separation performanceof HFC membrane can remain stable without obvious pore wetting during the continuous MD operationfor 36 h. Different from the desalination, porous hollow fiber membrane would adsorb two differentcharged dyes, Congo red (CR) and methylene blue (MB) to a certain extent, resulting in the decrease ofmembrane flux and the change of permeate water quality. Finally, the MD separation mechanism of inorganicsalt, anionic dye and cationic dye by PTFE powder-embedded HFC membrane was proposed.