Design and Construction of an Improved Solar Still for Production of Pure Water

Abstract

Water is a vital natural resource that is needed for the existence and survival of plants and animals on earth. Today fresh water demand is increasing continuously, because of the industrial development but only about 3% of the world water is potable and this amount is not evenly distributed on the earth. Many parts of the developing countries do not have access to a suitable source of clean drinking water. Most of the sources of water available are from streams, lakes, rivers and sea which cause many diseases because of their impurities. An improved solar still for the production of pure water was design, constructed, and tested for this research work. The system used a separated storage (feed water tank) to collector (distilled water collector tank). Both numerical and experimental methods are used in the analysis for the optimum performance of the system. The result showed that for the period under reviewed (May – December, 2015), the average productivity of solar still was 143.99 liters/hour at 213.45Wm^-2 average daily solar radiation and the overall efficiency of the solar still was 67.15%. This research work has demonstrated that solar water distillation system can be adopted to meet the drinking water need of a typical household and laboratory users.