Water and Energy International

One of the issues that most rural areas in India encounter is lack of safe and clean drinking water sources. Water is mostly sourced in these areas from shallow wells and rivers. This water, however, might be polluted with hazardous compounds such as pathogenic germs and hence unsuitable to drink. Solar water distillation is a significant solution to the problem of fresh water scarcity. Solar water stills can be used to remove dangerous compounds from contaminated water before it is drunk, by treating it with free solar energy. As a result, there is an urgent need to enhance solar still performance in order to generate a higher quantity and quality of safe drinking water. In order to tackle this problem, in this present work an attempt is made to optimise the performance of the solar still by using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to study the effects of various parameters such as basin material, insulation of the solar still, still water depth, inlet water temperature, top cover material, and angle of the upper cover. The performance of the solar still (i.e., rate of distillation) for the above parameters is depicted graphically and necessary conclusions are drawn.