Investigations on solar still with multifunctional floating absorbers for enhanced freshwater production

Abstract

The access to freshwater is essential to the survival of human beings on this planet. Many newlinefactors such as exponential population growth, urbanization, and industrialization have newlineresulted in the depletion of available freshwater reserves. The solution to this crisis is to newlineproduce freshwater from the available resources such as sea water, reclamation and reuse newlineof greywater. Conventional desalination systems such as reverse osmosis, multi-stage newlineflash are now capable of producing freshwater at any required rates. However, these newlinesystems are capital intensive, energy intensive and cause environmental degradation newlinebecause of the dependence on fossil fuels. Solar still offers a cost effective and sustainable newlinemeans for producing freshwater. Conventional solar still suffers from low productivity newlineand low efficiency due to low solar thermal conversion along with optical, thermal and newlineother parasitic energy losses. newlineMulti-functional floating absorber based solar still (FASS), a relatively new design, newlinehas the potential to overcome the drawbacks associated with conventional solar still newline(CSS). Multi-functional floating absorbers possess the desired characteristics for superior newlinevapour generation in a cost effective, scalable and facile manner to be used in a solar still. newlineThe present work focuses on designing, developing and testing of multi-functional newlinefloating absorbers in solar still. The important design and thermal aspects associated with newlinethe vapour space of the floating absorber is investigated with the objective of improving newlinethe performance of FASS under variable daily solar radiation patterns, which is prevalent newlineduring summer season in Calicut. newline