New solar seawater desalination system using wick material and obtuse surface: experimental evaluation

Solar desalination takes great importance in the production of desalinated water by direct water heating and evaporation, previous researches in open literature addressed with the single slope conventional solar still without focusing on the advantage of its basin back wall. Therefore, in recent study, the back wall is taken into consideration for producing the desalinated water. Moreover, a modified obtuse solar still was designed and used, which its back wall was tilted with an obtuse angle, furthermore a burlap sheet acts as porous material was fixed on the tilted back wall surface. The obtuse solar still contained two surfaces for water vapor production: one was the main horizontal water basin, while the other was the obtuse back wall which equipped with the porous media (burlap sheet). Moreover, the obtuse solar still system was compared with the conventional solar still for all experiments. The experiments were performed during three different seasons for consecutive some days for each season around the year 2019 in March, June and December. The main results showed that the obtuse solar still produced about twice the productivity of the conventional solar still. Furthermore, the obtuse solar still gave production efficiency as high as 37.9%. Moreover, the productivity of the obtuse solar still reached up to 1.74 times of the productivity of the conventional solar still.