Solar Water Distillation Using Different Phase Change Materials

Abstract

Energy and water are the keys to modern life and provide the basis necessary for sustained economic development. Securing sustainable and future energy supplies will be the greatest challenge faced by all societies in this century. Due to a growing world population and increasing modernization, global energy and water demand is projected to more than double during the first half of the twenty first century and to more than triple by the end of the century. According to the United States Census Bureau estimation, that the world population exceeded 7 billion on 12th March, 2012. Finding sufficient supplies of clean and sustainable energy and water for the future is the global society’s most daunting challenge for the twenty first century. The future will be a mix of energy technologies with renewable sources such as solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, ocean waves and tidal energies playing an increasingly important role in the new global energy economy. Approximately one-third of the world’s population lives in rural regions without access to the electric grid and about half of these same people live without access to safe and clean water. Solar energy is unique in that it can easily provide electricity and purified water for these people today with minimal infrastructure requirements by using local energy resources that promote local economic development. Many conventional and nonconventional techniques have been developed for purification of saline or brackish water. Among these water purification systems, solar distillation proves to be economical and eco-friendly technique. So many experimental investigations were conducted on solar distillation techniques in many countries like India, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey etc. But there is no more works on solar water distillation using reflectors. So, this work is mainly focused on the water distillation using solar energy with different phase change materials with internal reflectors. Sodium Sulphate, Paraffin Wax (white) are used as phase change materials, among these Paraffin Wax (white) gave more yield of distillation water.