Electroplating wastewater is one of the extremely harmful sewages, which must be pretreated before being discharged. The evaporation method can be used to pretreat the electroplating waste water and recover it waste resources, but its shortcomings of high energy consumption limit its use. Through coupling a closed heat pump cycle and the membrane distillation process, a novel electroplating wastewater treatment system is proposed in this work to pretreat the electroplating wastewater, the metal salts is recovered and the energy consumption is low. Based on the Aspen Plus simulation platform, the proposed system model is built. After verifying the key components model with the experimental data, the key operating parameters influences on the overall thermodynamic performance of the system have been investigated, and the following results are obtained. Increasing the feed rate caused a substantial increase in the power consumption of the system, but impacted little on the latent heat of the distillation membrane, so the feed rate had the greatest impact on the gain water ratio (GOR) of the system. Due to the increase in processing flow, the yield ratio (YRO) of the system increased slightly, but the feed rate showed almost no effect on the coefficient of performance (COP) of the system. The evaporation temperature had a great influence on the COP of the system, and the COP increased with the increase of the evaporation temperature. The downward trend of the system GOR decreased slowly and then steeply with the feed temperature increase. The GOR of the system was affected by the evaporation temperature and increased as the evaporation temperature was increased. YRO was affected by the combination of evaporation temperature and system power consumption, and showed different trends at high and low feed temperatures. The feed concentration played an important role in the YRO. YRO increased as the feed concentration was increased. The GOR at different concentrations was closer at the low feed temperature. Therefore, these results can provide significant references for the further implementation and optimization of the proposed system.