Investigation of conical passive solar still by incorporating energy metrics, efficiency, and sensitivity analyses for sustainable solar distillation

Abstract

The application of solar energy technology to solve the freshwater scarcity problem of society will contribute to the sustainable development goal of the United Nations. It will also recede the dependency on fossil fuels. This paper deals with the investigation of conical passive solar still (CPSS) by incorporating energy metrics, efficiency, and sensitivity analyses. Fundamental equations have been obtained from the thermal modelling of CPSS followed by experimental validation. The coefficient of correlation for water temperature is about 0.96, for condensing surface temperature is about 0.99 and for freshwater yield is also 0.99. The present work involves diverse monthly weather conditions for the performance analysis of CPSS. In the present work, a MATLAB-based computational code is used to compute hourly freshwater output, exergy, and energy assessment for their yearly results. Afterward, energy metrics and different efficiencies were computed, and the outcomes were compared with recent investigations. Finally, the energy payback time has been lowered by 161.40%. The energy production factor and life cycle conversion efficiency for CPSS were improved by 61.71% and 28.20%, respectively, compared with the conventional solar still. The comparative study of daily thermal efficiency reveals that the efficiency of CPSS is higher by 51.47% than V-type solar still.