Thermal Analysis of Single Slope Solar Still with Sensible Storage Material (Sand)

Abstract

In this work authors utilized easily available and cheap sensible storage material (sand) in single basin solar still. The sensible storage material helps to enhance the distillate output from solar still during no sunshine hours. The mathematical model of the proposed solar still has been developed and experimentally validated. The numerical computation has been performed to analyse the effect of mass od sand placed beneath the basin plate. It is seen that with increase in mass of sand the overall daily distillate output decreases. When mass of sand increases from 15kg to 60 kg the daily distillate output decrease by 11.8%. The total daily distillate output produced by proposed still for a day in summer for Raipur is 5.32l/m2 which is about 24.4% more than conventional single slope solar still. The total nocturnal production of pure water from the propped still for a day in summer in Raipur climate is 1.37l/m2. The proposed solar still with sand storage is a good available cheap option to increase the overall productivity of conventional single slope solar still.