Innovation of Solar Desalination System Coupled with Solar Collector: Experimental Study

Abstract

The supply of drinking water is a growing problem especially for developing countries because of the industrial development, intensified agriculture, improvement of standard of life and increase of the world population. For this reason, purification of water supplies is extremely important. Solar stills are used for solar distillation plants due to its simplicity in construction and operation, low cost and however the yield is low. Because of its low productivity it is not popularly used. A lot of research work is undertaken to improve the productivity of the still. This paper presents the new design of solar distillation system coupled to a condenser, solar air and water collector and packed bed. This new concept of distiller solar still using humidification- dehumidification processes which is exploited for the desalination purpose. The experiment is carried out during the summer climatic conditions of Tunisia. The productivity in a solar still mainly depends on the temperature difference between the evaporation tower water and the condensation tower for a given surface area. The results clearly show that the instantaneous efficiency increases with the increase of solar radiation and with the increase of feed water temperature.