SOLAR STILL PERFORMANCE FOR SEA WATER PURIFICATION: A STATISTICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Abstract

Sudden rise of fossil fuel prices and its scarce resources have caused the energy crises for the past few years. Current research has been focused primarily using renewable source of energy. The solar energy has been proved to be an economical alternative renewable energy used to extract the fresh water from sea water. The principle objective of the study is to purify the sea water by using solar energy. A pilot scale solar still has been designed, fabricated and optimized for maximum evaporation rate of model sea water. The various parameters such as water depth in still, average day temperature and average water temperature in still were studied experimentally and verified statistically though ANOVA (analysis of variance). It was found that the water temperature in the still is the most significant parameter that largely affects the evaporation rate. The fresh water with 240 mg/L dissolved salt has been extracted from the model sea water having dissolved salts of 35000 mg/L. The efficiency of a single basin solar still is improved up to 80 percent.