Studies on enhancing the productivity of single basin single slope solar stills using various materials and heat storage mediums

Abstract

Water is the basic necessity of the mankind The demand of fresh water is increasing day by day The major portion of the available water I e 97 is salty sea water and 2 is in the form of ice and glaziers Only 1 of the water is pure potable water Hence to meet the demand of fresh water it is necessary to convert the impure salty sea water or brackish water into pure water There are several methods employed to convert the impure water into pure water The types of method include Reverse Osmosis Vapour compression Desalination Multistage flash distillation Multiple effect distillation Humidification and dehumidification freezing etc Solar distillation or solar desalination is a type of distillation process which converts the impure brackish water into potable water using solar energy The solar distillation methods have been used by the man kind for thousands of years In fact it was the first method which was used on a small scale to convert impure saline water to potable water The main drawback of the solar desalination using solar stills is its low productivity Normally a solar still can yield 2 5 5 lm2day of distillate Several researches have been done to increase the productivity of the solar stills The factors affecting the productivity of solar stills are incident solar radiation wind velocity ambient temperature glass cover temperature difference water depth inlet water temperature area of absorption etc newline