Experimental studies on solar Desalination system with phase Change material as energy Storage media

Abstract

Among water, food and energy which are vital for sustainable development, water is considered to be essential to lead life on earth. Although two third of the planet is covered with water, yet 785 million people mostly from developing and under developed countries are still lacking access to clean potable water due to fast growth in population and rapid consumption of fresh water by growing industries. Solar distillation proves to be a promising technique which utilizes renewable energy alone for its operation. Solar distiller commonly known as solar still is suitable for small scale distillation of saline water and hence, it is suitable for domestic use in rural and arid places to solve their daily drinking water needs. However, low productivity is one of the major drawbacks identified in solar stills. Numerous research works are reported to improve the distillate output of the solar still by making certain design modifications and addition of energy from external source to the conventional stills. In the present work, an attempt is made to improve the productivity of the solar still with the aid of square tubular fins embedded over the basin liner of the still, latent heat thermal energy storage material and the square tubular fins extended in the storage zone. In the first phase of experimentation, two single basin single slope solar stills of same design parameters are fabricated, the one is used as conventional still and the other is modified by introducing square tubular fins and thermal energy storage material. Here, the modified still is tested experimentally with (i) mere fins on the surface of the basin liner, (ii) with mere thermal energy storage material placed beneath the basin liner, and (iii) with both fins and thermal energy storage material above and below the basin liner newline