Modeling and Experimental Investigation of Solar Stills for Enhancing Water Desalination Process

Despite the importance of the desalination process in removal of water salinity to produce fresh drinking water, it is an energy-consuming process. Therefore, the use of solar energy as an alternative and free energy source has an important role in enhancing the efficiency of the desalination proces...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE access 2020, Vol.8, p.219457-219472
Main Authors: Mostafa, Marwa, Abdullah, Heba M., Mohamed, Mohamed A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aerodynamics
Air flow
Atmospheric modeling
Computational fluid dynamics
computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
Desalination
Drinking water
Free energy
Mathematical model
Mathematical models
Process parameters
Productivity
solar chimney
Solar chimneys
Solar energy
solar stills
Temperature distribution
Temperature measurement
Water depth
water desalination
water salinity
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Summary:Despite the importance of the desalination process in removal of water salinity to produce fresh drinking water, it is an energy-consuming process. Therefore, the use of solar energy as an alternative and free energy source has an important role in enhancing the efficiency of the desalination process. This paper presents an experimental investigation using solar chimney to enhance the desalination process, where a modification to the conventional solar stills has been made. A mathematical model describing air flow inside the solar chimney has been constructed using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The commercial CFD package fluent release 6.3 has been used in this paper to express the air flow and temperature distribution inside solar chimney. Furthermore, the process parameters such as seasonal temperature, salt concentration, water depth and type of solar desalination unit have been examined to find the best operating conditions. The desalination process has been recommended to be carried out under permissible operating conditions in sunny days, with water depths ranging from (1-2 cm) and low salt concentration ranging from (3.5-8%). The modeled data has been verified with experimental data and the verification results have been estimated at 14%. Simulation results showed that water desalination has been improved by 30%.
ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3038934