Solar chimney power-water distillation plant (SCPWDP)

Abstract

A new solar chimney power distillation plant (SCPWDP) is proposed and studied in this work. The plant generates electricity and produces distilled water by direct evaporation of water using the same geometry as the conventional Solar Chimney Power Plant (SCPP). The novelty of the proposed system is the use of the solar chimney for direct evaporation of water and extracts the energy from the wet air stream. The novelty is achieved by dividing the area of the collector into two sections; in the first section the air is heated, and then it passes over the water that existed in the second section of the collector area carrying with it water vapor. As the air passes through the chimney, the moist air exchanges the heat with the ambient outside the chimney resulting in water condensate at the inner surfaces of the chimney. The mathematical model has been developed, and the theoretical analysis has been carried out for the proposed system. The effects of several operating and geometric parameters on the system performance are studied and documented. These parameters include the area and the depth of water in the water section, collector material type and the height of the collector at the entrance. In general, the results showed that the proposed system could improve the solar utilization efficiency of the solar chimney to more than 100 times of the conventional system. Results also showed that at a fixed water height increasing the surface area of the water pool reduces the system efficiency while there is an optimum height of water at which the system efficiency is maximum. It is expected that the proposed SCPWDP will open new opportunities for using the solar chimney as renewable energy driven device for water distillation.