Augmentation of The Diurnal Productivity of Basin Type Single Slope Solar Still using Floating Wicks in The Basin
Abstract
In present work, the conventional single effect basin type solar still has been modified by incorporating floating wicks inside the basin to augment its daily distillate output. The still having floating wicks in the basin water is referred as modified still. Both the stills were fabricated with same material and dimensions for comparison purpose and the performance of modified still and conventional still has been compared under similar operating and weather conditions. The use of float wicks reduced thermal inertia of the basin leading to early response and higher operating temperatures which resulted in enhanced distillate outputs of the modified still as compared to the conventional still. In this work, the area ratio of floating wicks and basin surface is varied so that still can produce sufficient amount of distillate during night also. The gain in day productivity of modified still was found be increased from 16.9% to 59.5 % as we increase the area ratio of wick to basin from 0.4 to 1. While the gain in night productivity decreased from 20% to -33.33% as area ratio of wick to basin varied from 0.4 to 1. The maximum overall gain in productivity of modified still over the conventional still was found to be 21 % at 0.6 area ratio.The overall productivity of modified and conventional still for 0.6 area ratio was found to be 4.24 kg/m2 and 3.48 kg/m2 respectively at 3 cmbasin water depth and 22.79 MJ/m2 solar intensity.
