Fabrication of Solar Desalination System and Experimental Investigation of its Performance of it, Located in Ahvaz City

Abstract

With the increasing population and heightening quality levels of life in the world, the use of freshwater resources has increased to such an extent that their shortage is considered a serious crisis. Today, manufacturing and untiring solar stills, which produce freshwater without polluting the environment, besides, at a low cost, have been considered a suitable solution to eliminate the shortage of fresh water. In recent years, water desalination has been at the center of interest more than ever in Iran because of the drought and water shortage crisis. For this reason, the design and manufacture of distilled solar still suitable for the geographical conditions of Ahvaz were accomplished. And a device with two inclined planes was selected after studying different types of distilled solar stills. In the first step, a thermal model of different heat transfer phenomena including radiation, conductivity, evaporation, and condensation was employed so that it was utilized to predict the performance of the device in various conditions and the heat analysis of the system. The governing equations in MATLAB software were then implemented and solved. According to the results of the software, which estimates the amount of the produced water using meteorological data consisting of radiation intensity and ambient air temperature, as well as the material features of different parts of the device, the dimensions of the device were designed and the device was manufactured. This device was tested on one of the winter days in January and the production amount of freshwater, as well as temperatures of glass coatings, water, and absorbent surface, were recorded. The production amount of freshwater on the 4th of January in a practical test was 0.98 L/m2.

Keywords

• desalination
• distilled solar
• solar radiation
• heat transfer
• ceramic