article · Case Studies in Thermal Engineering
Solar stills provide an eco-friendly approach to producing fresh drinking water in sunny, arid regions, but standard designs often suffer from low daily output. An experimental evaluation tested cylindrical sector solar stills against conventional double-slope models under Egyptian climate conditions, evaluating the use of affordable additions such as black fibre and black dye with a basin water depth of two centimetres. The cylindrical design consistently generated higher daily yields, reaching 3,514 millilitres per square metre compared to 3,029 millilitres per square metre for the double-slope alternative, representing an improvement of roughly sixteen percent. The cylindrical system also demonstrated superior daily thermal efficiency at over thirty percent alongside a lower water production cost and a shorter financial payback period. Across all evaluated conditions, the cylindrical sector configuration proved more productive and cost-effective than the double-slope arrangement.
Water scarcity affects many arid and sunny regions where conventional water treatment infrastructure is limited or costly. Demonstrating that cylindrical sector solar stills combined with cheap, readily available materials like black fibre and dye improve yields while lowering unit costs offers a practical route to decentralised drinking water generation.
The research represents applied and tested hardware evaluated under real climate conditions, aimed at low-cost potable water production in arid areas. Prospective users include off-grid communities, smallholders, and rural development initiatives seeking affordable desalination or purification equipment. Commercial deployment would depend on manufacturing the cylindrical sector units locally using the identified low-cost materials, supported by the calculated 92-day payback period and production cost of approximately 0.0119 US dollars per litre.
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Solar stills are considered one of the most thermally eco-friendly and promising solutions for producing potable water in sunny and arid regions. However, they suffer from a disadvantage in terms of their low productivity. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the performance of cylindrical sector solar stills and compare them with double-slope solar stills. The study also presents the enhanced performance of a thermo-economic system by integrating cost-effective and readily available materials. The experiments were conducted in Egyptian climate conditions, with a water depth of 2 cm in the stills basin, using different materials. Under the same operating conditions, the results showed that the accumulated productivities of the cylindrical sector solar stills (CSSS) and double slope solar stills (DSSS), using black fiber and black dye, were 3514 ml/m2 and 3029 ml/m2, respectively, representing an increase of 16.01%. Furthermore, the daily thermal efficiency of the CSSS and DSSS, using black fiber and black dye, were 30.42% and 26.32%, respectively, showing an increase of 15.58%. The cost per liter (CPL) of potable water produced by CSSS, using black dye with black natural-fiber, was approximately 0.0119 US$/L, while it was 0.0137 US$/L for DSSS. Additionally, the payback periods for CSSS and DSSS were 92 days and 106 days, respectively. In all scenarios studied, the daily accumulated productivities and thermal efficiency of CSSS were greater than those of DSSS.
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DOI: 10.1016/j.csite.2023.103310
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