Performance improvement of a tubular solar still using V-corrugated absorber with wick materials: Numerical and experimental investigations

Abstract

Tubular solar still is characterized by having a large condensing and receiving surface area compared to traditional single slope solar still. The present study aims to enhance the performance of tubular solar still through the mathematical and experimental investigation of proposed modifications applied to the conventional tubular solar still. The modification was done by using the v-corrugated absorbers and inclusion of wick materials to maximize the rate of evaporation, in order to achieve the maximum possible utilization of the large condensing surface area that characterize the tubular solar stills to increase the distillate water productivity. This goal was achieved by forming the absorbent surface in a v-corrugated form and using black jute clothes that are installed on the v-corrugated surface so that they take the same corrugated form and the lower half of the corrugated black jute clothes was immersed in water and the rest of the clothes are saturated with water by the capillary property. The performance of modified tubular still with v-corrugated wick materials and conventional tubular still with flat absorber surface was compared under the weather Egyptian conditions to characterize the performance enhancement of the modified design. The results show that the conventional tubular still gives the accumulated distillate production of 4150 ml/m2 while the v-corrugated wick materials utilization improves the distillate production to 6010 ml/m2, with 44.82% improvement in the productivity. Also, the average efficiency along the test days for the conventional tubular still reached 35%, while the v-corrugated wick materials utilization improves the average efficiency to51.4%, with 46.86% improvement in average efficiency.