Abstract
Solar distillation system depends on adhesion of water molecules inside the glass cover of solar stills. Regular glass surfaces are prone to adsorbing other unwanted compounds and in turn lowers the percentage of recovery of pure distilled water. In this study, the production of purified distilled water was compared with and without the use of graphene-based surface modifiers. In areas where salt content is high, the first pass is still usually laden with salts. Hence, to improve adhesion of water and rejection of salts, both the inside glass cover surfaces and the metal absorber plates were modified using oxygen plasma treatment and graphene surface enhancement. Results showed a 48.9% improvement of distilled water recovery from an initial recovery of 2.90 L/m2/day to an average of 4.32 L/m2/day. In addition, the resulting distilled water passes the World Health Organization (WHO) drinking water standards such as pH, electrical conductivity (EC) and salinity. The average reduction in electrical conductivity was 96.52%, an average increase of 5.06% of pH and an average reduction of salinity of 96.52%, all measured at the highest brine salinity of 5%. The reported value of electrical conductivity was 23.33 µS/cm, a lowest and near neutral pH of 6.85 and an average salinity of 12.10 ppm.
Highlights
There are numerous areas in the world, especially along coastal regions, without potable water or water for irrigation purposes (Rakib et al, 2019)
The wetting properties of any surface material can be defined by the interactions between the material surface and water molecules (Li and Guo, 2018)
The results showed that some part of the surface became blurry after 4-min treatment, which was caused by the exposure to plasma
Summary
There are numerous areas in the world, especially along coastal regions, without potable water or water for irrigation purposes (Rakib et al, 2019). Natural drinking water is being infused by high salt content due to poor environmental management and as a result of climate change (Vineis et al, 2011). Desalination plants are commonly used by many countries to partly remove the salts and other minerals from water sources. Many of these advanced desalination systems, such as reverse osmosis and membrane systems, are quite expensive (Voutchkov, 2017 and van Wyk et al, 2020). Notable countries are those in Europe (the Netherlands), Australia, Brazil, and Asia (Bangladesh and Malaysia). According to Jones et al (2019), about 141.5 million m3/day of desalinated water is produced globally each day, while brine water production totals 141.5 m3/day
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