Continuous Solar Desalination Unit (CSDU)

Desalination techniques –to remove salts from water – have been used widely around the world, to reduce the water crisis, since there are nearly 1 in 10 people lack access to safe water. Solar desalination is one of the most promising technique among all of other desalination techniques especially in remote areas that suffer from lack of fresh water. Most of the available solar designs are batch which gave commonly low productivity, therefore, this project aims to design and build a continuous solar desalination unit (CSDU), and study the effect of environmental and operational conditions on its productivity where rotating belt, suction fan and compressor were added and classified into five cases. The solar still has been experimentally tested for three months. Promising results were achieved, the productivity was measured along several days during February to April. The maximum and minimum evaporation fluxes achieved were 11.4 and 6.9 (liter/m2.day), respectively, while solar irradiation at those days were (5.03 and 4.11kWh/m2.day), respectively. The average productivity for conventional solar stills was (3-4) liter/ m2.day, which lower than CSDU’s average productivity that reach approximately 9.73 liter/ m2.day, where 64.02% enhancement is obtained. The tested results confirmed that running the apparatus with rotating belt, compressor, and fans at average solar radiation= 5.65kWh/m2 has a high significant effect than running the unit while they are turned off. The improvement was 86%, which mean that integrating of these enhancements will improve the productivity of solar still. In addition, results indicate that the evaporation rate was highly affected by weather conditions. Since the evaporation rate increases with increasing solar radiation and temperature and decreases with increasing the relative humidity. These prove that the constructed apparatus is working in the right way.