Solar distillation of water employing thermal energy storage medium: A review
Author(s):
Tri Hieu Le†,*, Xuan Phuong Nguyen†, Atit Koonsrisuk‡, Thanh Phuong Nguyen‡†,*
Affiliation(s):
†Institute of Maritime, Ho Chi Minh city University of Transport, Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam
‡School of Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Engineering, Suranaree University of Technology, Nakhon Rachasima, Thailand
‡†Institute of Engineering, Ho Chi Minh city University of Technology (HUTECH), Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam
Corresponding Author Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Population explosion and the development of industrial as well as agricultural sector in the last decades caused the exponential growth in portable water need. Additionally, Climate change and global warming can contribute to the desertification and the increase of the sea level, which lead to the fresh water scarcity. Over the years, harnessing solar energy for desalinizing sea water has become one of sustainable and economical technique to supplement into global clean water resource. There are numerous efforts to improve the productivity as well as thermal efficiency of passive solar still for commercialize in large scale. Amongst these technological advancements, approach applying energy storage materials has been received much attention for an efficient performance of solar still, which can be a key solution to help solar application operate at off sunshine hours. In this work, the performance of thermal energy storage materials including sensible and latent heat storage material in a solar still was reviewed. The best design for increment the PCM’s thermal conductivity is the hollow-cylinder fins. The additional time as using phase change materials depends on the amount of brackish water in basin and phase change materials. Paraffin wax showed the best improvement in the daily distilled yield of a conventional solar still within used phase change materials. The low thermal conductivity of Paraffin wax can be solved with the hollow cylindrical pin fins in the design of basin