Experimental Investigations of Solar Stills Connected to External Passive Condensers

Abstract

Solar stills are regarded as one among the foremost promising solutions to solve water scarcity problems, mainly in arid remote areas. Enhancing the solar stills performances and increasing their productivity are the main goals of the investigators in recent years. The aim of this research is to explore ways to increase distillation productivity of conventional, simple basin type solar still. Therefore three identical simple type solar stills were designed, manufactured, and tested under the actual environment in Bahrain during the month of July, two of which, are connected with external passive condensers. The first is a conventional still, and was used as a reference for comparison. In the second still, two passive condensers were connected in parallel, only to the upper part of the back of the still. While in the third still, another two condensers were connected in parallel to, both, upper and lower parts of the back of the solar still.
It has been found that the still incorporating condensers connected only to the upper part of the back of the still yielded an increase of 15.1% of the distilled water production rate. The still incorporating condensers connected to the upper and lower parts of the back of the still yielded an increase of 30.54% in the production rate of distilled water.