Improving the performance of tubular solar still integrated with drilled carbonized wood and carbon black thin film evaporation

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This paper presented the enhanced thermo-exergoenviroeconomic performance of tubular solar still (TSS) by integrating an eco-friendly, cost-effective, and available material combination. The combination was proposed to obtain thermally enhanced thin-film evaporation. On the one hand, medium-density fiberboard (MDF) carbonized wood was proposed due to its floatability and good capillarity. In addition, carbon black (CB) nanoparticles (NPs) were utilized to enhance the surface thermal characteristic: absorptivity and conductivity. Three experimental cases were investigated to determine the best specifications of the combination: wood thickness and NPs concentration. First, three different standard wood thicknesses (4, 6, and 9 mm) were tested to state the best one, which was 4 mm that achieved a productivity increase of 30.8%. Then, the 4 mm-thick wood was carbonized, drilled, and experimented, which attained 41.9% production augmentation. Finally, the efficacy of six different CB NPs' concentrations (from 20 to 120 g/m2 with a step of 20 g/m2) on the TSS yield was determined. Among them, the best concentration was 80 g/m2, achieving a 67.1 % yield improvement. Analytically, the thermo-exergoeviroeconomic performance was assessed. The results showed maximum improvement ratios of 49.62 and 89.78% for daily energy and exergy efficiencies, respectively. Besides, the economic analysis showed that using the proposed combination could achieve saving in the freshwater price by 32.36% w.r.t conventional TSS. Moreover, from the environmental point of view, the modified TSS can be considered as more eco-friendly than the conventional one as more CO2 could be mitigated. To sum up, from thermo-economic performance, all the resulting data proved that the proposed improvements were very effective and feasible.