Investigating the thermo-economic performance and modeling of a parabolic solar collector with phase change material in the receiver tube in a solar desalination

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Solar desalination is a suitable and cost-effective system for producing drinkable water from salt water. The main goal of this study is improving the thermal performance of the solar desalination with latent thermal storage system and the panel detector. The heat loss from the solar collector increases due to the fluctuations in the intensity of solar radiation and the use of phase change materials is a suitable solution for storing energy during peak hours and releasing it when the solar radiation intensity is reduced or absent. Thus phase change material (paraffin) placed in the focal tube in the form of a 6 mm spiral pipe with a pitch of 7 cm. Thermal performance of the collector was carried out at three fluid flow rates of the working fluid at 1.9, 1.3 and 4.2 l/min with phase change material and without phase change material in four consecutive days from 10:00 to 14:00. The results of the showed that the solar water desalination equipped with phase change materials had the highest thermal efficiency at the fluid flow rate of 4.2l/min and the lowest with a flow rate of 1.9 l/min. The results showed that the using phase change material improves the thermal efficiency by 3.05 %. Produced fresh water during 4 h was 0.722l/m2 and it significantly reduced the hardness of drinking water. The solar collector simulated by Anysy and the simulated results showed a good correlation between the predicted and experimental data with reasonable accuracy (R2 > 0.97).