Performance Enhancing of Single Slope Solar Still Using Glass Cover Cooling

What is it about?

As the global population grows year by year, fears from un adequate freshwater supplies are arising owing to the increasing demand by the population. The use of Solar energy to desalinate brackish water is one of the approaches that can be followed to produce potable water, such a process called solar desalination. The most attractive and well-known solar desalination technique is solar still. The use of a water spray system as glass cover cooling of single slope solar still was experimentally investigated as an attempt to enhance the daily productivity of solar still. The cooling water was sprayed in a pulse form for 30 sec while the time between any two successive pulses was altered as 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, and 30 minutes, respectively. the present work also considered the form of continuous cooling water spray. The collected result highlighted that the daily productivity of conventional single slope solar still enhanced by 10%, 14%, 27%, 17.5%, as single slope solar integrated with a cooling system of (30 sec/ 30 min), (30 sec/ 20 min), (30 sec/ 10 min), and (30 sec/ 5 min), respectively. Where the best pulse timing was (30 sec/ 10 min) since any farther increment induces a negative influence on the daily output of the conventional single slope solar still.

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Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Water is a vital element for all living creatures on earth. As the global population grows year by year, fears from un adequate freshwater supplies are arising owing to the increasing demand by the population. Besides population other factors directly influences freshwater crises such as urbanization, climate change, industrial activities, etc. the United Nations published a devastating report highlighting that 50% of the population on the earth might suffer from insufficient freshwater by the year 2030. The current study focused on enhancing the performance of single slope solar still using a water spray system to cool the glass cover. Our findings show that The cumulative production rate of the conducted experiments suggested that the best methodology is to adopt (30 sec/ 10 min), due to producing a higher amount of water in contrast to other methodologies with an over enhancement of 27% higher than CSS. Furthermore, insulating the cooling water tanks enhanced the daily yield up to 34.75%. This has been improved up to 41% by protecting the piping of the spray system from weather conditions.

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