article · Alexandria Engineering Journal
Solar stills provide an affordable option for producing freshwater in water-stressed regions, but their overall productivity remains low, particularly during cloudy or rainy weather. To address this, an investigation was conducted to enhance the output of a trays solar still treating brackish water or seawater. Researchers lowered the operating water depth and introduced sand beds as thermal storage materials, comparing yellow and black sand across different bed heights. Internal reflectors were also integrated to capture additional solar energy. Experimental results confirmed that adding sand storage layers significantly boosted freshwater yield. The highest accumulated production was achieved using a 1 cm bed of black sand alongside internal reflectors, resulting in a 105 per cent increase in freshwater generation compared to a conventional solar still.
Clean drinking water is scarce in many arid and coastal regions. While conventional solar stills provide an affordable desalination method, their low output limits practical adoption. Demonstrating that readily available materials such as sand and reflectors can more than double freshwater production offers a realistic pathway to improve decentralised water security without significantly increasing capital or operational costs.
The findings are relevant to developers of small-scale, decentralised desalination systems serving off-grid or water-stressed communities. Using low-cost, accessible thermal storage materials like sand lowers manufacturing barriers. The work is applied and tested at an experimental stage, meaning prototype field trials under varying outdoor conditions would be needed before translation into commercial products.
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In order to maintain access to freshwater resources in water-stressed regions, it is important to improve the performance of solar-powered desalination systems with lower cost units like solar stills (SS). However, the SS produces low productivity especially through the rainy or cloudy days due to the indirect diffused beams. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to increase the yield from brackish/seawater via a solar still operating with renewable energy sources. The water depth was lowered, and thermal storage materials with different sand beds trays solar still (TSS) are used to augment the amount of yield from a SS. The effects of sandy bed height, and sand type (black and yellow) on the performance of TSS were investigated. Also, the effect of internal reflectors on the sand TSS performance was investigated. Experimental results revealed that the sandy layer (storage beds) improves the TSS production. The maximum increase in accumulated production of sandy TSS with internal reflectors was reached at sand beds height of 1 cm and black sand. In this case, the freshwater was heightened by 105 % over CSS.
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DOI: 10.1016/j.aej.2023.03.084
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