A review on productivity enhancement of solar still by application of PCM and nano enhanced PCM

• Main Authors: Agrawal, Rahul, Singh, Krishna Deo Prasad
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Brackish water; Configuration management; Desalination; Design modifications; Distillation; Distilled water; Drinking water; Flat plates; Phase change materials; Productivity; Solar energy; Sunlight; Systems design; Water purification
• ISSN: 0094-243X; 1551-7616
• DOI: 10.1063/5.0050018

The availability of drinking water is reducing day by day; whereas the requirement of drinking water is increasing rapidly. To overcome this problem there is a need for some sustainable source for the water distillation (purification). Solar still is a useful device that can be used for the distilling of brackish water for the drinking purposes but the use of solar still is not popular due to its low productivity. In this article a review has been done for the enhancement of the productivity and efficiency of the solar desalination system. The increase in productivity could be attained by a proper modification in the system design. Therefore, different design configurations such as solar still coupled with a flat plate collector, external solar collector and double glass cover with cooling, and many more could be found in literatures. Another method for improving the productivity of solar stills is by incorporating phase change material (PCM) beneath the basin of still to store the excess amount of solar energy during the sunshine hours and release during off sunshine hours. Numerous experimental and numerical investigations on various types of solar still incorporated with different types of PCM's and Nano enhanced PCM's have been reported in various literatures. An extensive review for modified solar desalination systems has been carried out in this paper. However, the increase in the system productivity with high system cost may increase also the average annual cost of the distillate.