Abstract
Passive solar distillation is cheap and energy-efficient technology but its main disadvantage is low productivity. Thus, there are many attempts to improve solar stills’ productivity, and one of them is changing the mass of the water. This paper presents the results of validation of the thermal processes modeling in a solar still (SS). In order to validate the model, the experimental studies were conducted in a laboratory to ensure uniform climatic conditions. The studies were carried out for 10 kg, 15 kg, and 20 kg of water under three different solar irradiance conditions. The results show that 10 kg and 20 kg of water ensure the highest and the lowest daily productivity, respectively, independently of solar irradiance. When the water mass is 10 kg, the solar still’s productivity is 800 mL/m2/day, 3732 mL/m2/day, and 9392 mL/m2/day for low, medium, and high solar irradiance, respectively. Additionally, it is found that reducing the water mass from 20 kg to 10 kg can improve solar still’s productivity by a maximum value of 21.6%, which is obtained for low solar irradiance. The proposed mathematical model allows predicting the performance of the SS. The results of the theoretical calculations are in good agreement with the results of the experiments. The minimum and maximum deviation between the actual and theoretical productivity of the SS is 1.1% and 8.3%, respectively.
Highlights
IntroductionThe availability of drinking water is essential in human life and its scarcity may be a source of serious diseases and cause death
The temperatures of water, basin, inner glass cover, and outer glass cover in the function of time obtained experimentally and theoretically are shown in Figure 5a–d, respectively. It can be seen from the experimental results that the maximum temperature of the water, basin, and glass was increasing with decreasing mass of water
The mass of water has the greatest influence on the performance of solar still at low power of the electric heaters, while the impact of water mass on the results decreases with the increasing power of the electric heaters
Summary
The availability of drinking water is essential in human life and its scarcity may be a source of serious diseases and cause death. According to World Health Organization [1], 829,000 people die from diarrhea each year globally as a result of drinking contaminated water, sanitation, and hand hygiene. Thermal desalination technologies like multi-stage flash distillation or multieffect distillation, and membrane-based desalination technologies like reverse osmosis or electrodialysis [2] can be examples of mature and widely used desalination technologies. These conventional technologies consume large amounts of energy, up to
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