article · Energy Sources Part A Recovery Utilization and Environmental Effects
Solar desalination offers a way to generate drinking water in remote areas, but standard solar stills often suffer from low daily output. An experimental study tested a vertical solar still design incorporating two rotating discs to increase evaporation and condensation rates. The investigation evaluated both a modified single-stage vertical distiller and a modified double-stage vertical distiller, comparing their performance against conventional tilted and conventional vertical designs across different disc rotation speeds between 0.125 and 2.5 revolutions per minute. The optimal performance occurred at a rotation speed of 1.5 revolutions per minute. The double-stage system achieved the highest daily freshwater yield of 16,500 millilitres per square metre, representing an increase of over 617 percent compared to the conventional tilted distiller, alongside a maximum thermal efficiency of 77.2 percent. The modified systems also reduced water production costs to under two cents per litre.
Solar stills provide an environmentally friendly and low-cost method for generating clean drinking water, especially in remote regions lacking reliable infrastructure. However, conventional designs produce very small amounts of water each day. By incorporating rotating discs into a vertical distillation configuration, water output increases substantially while lowering production costs per litre, making solar-powered water purification far more practical and efficient.
This experimental research demonstrates an applied and tested hardware modification for small-scale desalination systems aimed at supplying drinking water to remote off-grid communities. By lowering production costs to less than 0.02 dollars per litre and substantially boosting daily yield, the technology could be adopted by manufacturers of decentralised solar water purification equipment. Moving towards commercial deployment will require testing beyond controlled experimental setups to assess long-term operational durability.
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Solar desalination is a viable solution to provide drinkable water to remote areas using free energy, basic technologies, and a healthy environment. The challenge of low daily productivity inspires the researchers to find different approaches to increase the thermal performance of the distillation methods with minimized cost. This paper proposed a new distillation concept using solar stills. An innovative designed vertical distiller with two rotating discs was investigated. Besides, the performance of modified single-stage vertical distiller (MSSVD) and modified double stage vertical distiller (MDSVD) were studied and compared with that of the conventional tilted distiller (CTD) and conventional vertical distiller (CVD). Reaching the optimal depth of basin water and augmenting the evaporation and condensation rates of the vertical distiller were targeted. Moreover, different rotational speeds (from 0.125 rpm to 2.5 rpm) were investigated to indicate the optimum disc speed that provide the highest productivity. Experimental results indicated that the proposed vertical solar still provided higher freshwater productivity than the CTD. In addition, using rotating discs significantly improved the distillers’ yield. Also, the best distiller performance was achieved at 1.5 rpm. Moreover, the daily freshwater output was 2300 mL/m2.day for CTD, 2730 mL/m2.day for CVD, 10350 mL/m2.day for MSSVD, and 16500 mL/m2.day for MDSVD. So, the yield of MSSVD and MDSVD was improved by 350% and 617.4%, respectively over that of CTD. The maximum thermal efficiency for MSSVD and MDSVD was 48.4% and 77.2%, respectively. Finally, the average distillate cost was 0.027, 0.051, 0.018, and 0.019 $/L for CTD, CVD, MSSVD, and MDSVD, respectively.
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DOI: 10.1080/15567036.2021.1950238
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