Optimization and thermo-economic assessment of hemispherical solar distillers with a flat and concave basin: Experimental approaches

Abstract

One of the challenging issues facing the world today is a lack of clean drinking water. The straightforward and efficient solution to this problem is the use of solar stills, which is one of the solar desalination methods that use renewable energy. The design selection of the solar stills is one of the strategies for distillate optimization, which aims to increase the productivity of solar distillates. To achieve this idea, this study deals with a comparative performance analysis of two solar stills with the same hemispherical cover, one contains a flat basin and the second contains a concave basin. Two hemispherical solar distillers, one of which has a flat basin (HSD-FB) and the other has a concave basin (HSD-CB) were designed and tested in El Oued, Algeria, under the same climatic conditions to get the better design of basin solar distillers. The results showed that the concave basin represents the best design that achieved the highest performance of hemispherical solar distillers. The daily productivity of the hemispherical solar distiller with a concave basin (HSD-CB) reached 5.50 kg/m3 with an improvement of 23.59% compared to HSD-FB. Also, with the utilization of the concave basin (HSD-FB), the daily thermal efficiency increased from 37.69% to 46.43% with an improvement of 23.19% compared to HSD-FB.