Enhancing a solar still's performance by preheating the feed water and employing phase-change material

Abstract

Drinkable water is becoming increasingly scarce due to increased industrialization and population development, which has forced researchers to come up with new ways to meet this need. Drinkable water can be produced using solar stills, but their output isn't particularly high. A modified solar still (MSS) and a conventional still (CSS) have both been used in an experimental study. The MSS has undergone testing using spiral copper water heating coils (MSS), internal reflector (MSS-IR), and Nano-phase change material (MSS-IR-PCM). The performance of MSS and CSS was tested in three different sets of experiments under identical meteorological conditions. The rise in productivity/thermal efficiency for MSS, MSS-IR, and MSS-IR-PCM are 66%/44%, 81%/46.2% and 115%/51.3%, respectively. The distillate production was increased to be 81% higher than CSS's by adding internal reflector to the MSS's back wall. Therefore, the incorporation of the internal reflector boosted the MSS output by about 15%. It was shown that MSS-IR-PCM is 115% more productive overall than CSS. As a result, utilizing PCM boosted MSS-IR productivity by roughly 34% when compared to the situation without PCM. Economic analysis was also considered. For the CSS and MSS-IR-PCM, the cost of the distilled freshwater is 0.03 and 0.0235 $/L, respectively.