Computational Fluid Dynamic Applications for Solar Stills Efficiency Assessment: A Review

Abstract

Even though water is a renewable resource, the majority of the available water on the planet is unfit for human use. Moreover, the drinkable water demand is ever-increasing as a result of rising population, urbanization, and life standards, which makes the needs for sustainable, economic, and environment-friendly treatment alternatives of utmost importance. Seawater desalination using solar stills has been proposed as a promising alternative that may help to solve drinkable water scarcity issues. In the past decades, many studies have been conducted to assess the performance of different types of solar stills aiming to enhance their productivity. Computational fluid dynamic (CFD) numerical simulation is one of the approaches that have been used recently to assess the performance of solar stills. The present study performed a systematic review and bibliometric analysis to provide a comprehensive overview of CFD numerical simulation uses as a tool to assess solar stills performance. A total of 486 publications were collected initially from different databases for the period between 2012 and 2022. The collected publications were filtered through several stages reaching 43 publications of highest significance. The collected data were analyzed descriptively, and the bibliometric mapping was presented. Furthermore, the basics and principles of CFD numerical simulation of solar stills efficiency were described and discussed. Later, the previous studies were analyzed to understand the algorithms, methods, and still types used. Finally, future research scopes and conclusions were stated. The presented knowledge in this study can help to provide a deep overview of using CFD in studying the efficiency of solar stills and inspire researchers to identify future research ways and gaps.