Performance of finned and corrugated absorbers solar stills under Egyptian conditions

Abstract An experimental study was conducted to improve the productivity of basin solar stills by increasing the surface area of absorber (base of still) and rate of heat transfer between saline water and absorber. In view of this, three solar stills are designed and fabricated in order to study the performance of each still. The first one is a conventional type and the second is a finned still while the third one is corrugated still. The performance of the finned and corrugated solar stills is tested and compared with conventional still under the same climate conditions. The performance of different solar sills were tested under two cases; stills at the same water depth (50 mm) and stills at the same quantity of saline water (30 and 50 l). The results indicate that the productivity of finned and corrugated solar stills is higher than that for conventional still. Also it is found that at quantity of saline water 30 l the productivity increased, when finned solar still and corrugated solar still are used approximately by 40% and 21% respectively. In this case the daily efficiency and estimated cost of 1 l of distillate for finned, corrugated and conventional solar stills are approximately 47.5%–0.041 $, 41%–0.047 $ and 35%–0.049 $ respectively.

[1]  S. Husain,et al.  Effect of corrugation frequencies on natural convective heat transfer and flow characteristics in a square enclosure of vee‐corrugated vertical walls , 1993 .

[2]  K. Srithar,et al.  Desalination of effluent using fin type solar still , 2008 .

[3]  Hikmet Esen,et al.  Experimental energy and exergy analysis of a double-flow solar air heater having different obstacles on absorber plates , 2008 .

[4]  K. Srithar,et al.  Augmentation of saline streams in solar stills integrating with a mini solar pond , 2009 .

[5]  Abdelhafid Moummi,et al.  Energy analysis of a solar air collector with rows of fins , 2004 .

[6]  A. Hachemi,et al.  Experimental study of thermal performance of offset rectangular plate fin absorber-plates , 1999 .

[7]  K Abu-Hijleh,et al.  Experimental study of a solar still with sponge cubes in basin , 2003 .

[8]  A. Harmim,et al.  Experimental study of a double exposure solar cooker with finned cooking vessel , 2008 .

[9]  Abdulkadir Sengür,et al.  Modelling of a new solar air heater through least-squares support vector machines , 2009, Expert Syst. Appl..

[10]  K. Srithar,et al.  SINGLE BASIN SOLAR STILL WITH FIN FOR ENHANCING PRODUCTIVITY , 2008 .

[11]  Kamaruzzaman Sopian,et al.  Performance studies on a finned double-pass photovoltaic-thermal (PV/T) solar collector , 2007 .

[12]  Abdulkadir Sengür,et al.  Artificial neural network and wavelet neural network approaches for modelling of a solar air heater , 2009, Expert Syst. Appl..

[13]  Marc A. Rosen,et al.  Thermal performance of integrated collector storage solar water heater with corrugated absorber surface , 2010 .

[14]  K.G.T. Hollands,et al.  Optimization of an absorber plate fin having a step-change in local thickness , 1992 .

[15]  Bengt Hellström.  Derivation of efficiency factors for uneven irradiation on a fin absorber , 2004 .

[16]  Finite element analysis of laminar convection heat transfer and flow of the fluid bounded by V-corrugated vertical plates of different corrugation frequencies , 1994 .

[17]  Mehmet Esen,et al.  Experimental investigation of thermal performance of a double-flow solar air heater having aluminium cans , 2009 .

[18]  B. Katsoulis,et al.  The wind energy potential of western greece , 1992 .

[19]  A. S. Nafey,et al.  SOLAR STILL PRODUCTIVITY ENHANCEMENT , 2001 .

[20]  J. Fricke,et al.  Optimized finned absorber geometries for solar air heating collectors , 1999 .

[21]  S. D. Probert,et al.  Heat removal from a triangular finned flat-plate solar-energy collector , 1989 .

[22]  A. A. Mabrouk,et al.  Enhancement of solar still productivity using floating perforated black plate , 2002 .

[23]  J. P. Holman,et al.  Experimental methods for engineers , 1971 .