Design and performance investigation of Continuous Solar Desalination Unit (CSDU)

Nearly 1 billion people around the world are suffering from water scarcity. This number is expected to duplicate by 2025 which raises the urgency to find a practical solution. Desalination techniques – that remove salts from water – have been used widely to reduce the water crisis. Solar desalination is one of the promising techniques. Unfortunately, most of the available designs are batch which give commonly low productivity, therefore, this paper experimentally explores the performance of a home-made continuous solar desalination unit (CSDU) with a moving belt to speed up the water evaporation. Moreover, the performance investigation of the CSDU under different weather and operational conditions were studied. Thus, CSDU productivity had been measured for several days during February, March, April, and July. It was found that the maximum and minimum productivity achieved were 13.20 and 3.80 (liter/m2.day) respectively, with a corresponding solar radiation of 6.69 and 4.11 kWh/m2.day, respectively. The average productivity achieved using CSDU was 9.73 liter/m2.day which is 3 times higher than that achieved using open literature conventional solar stills CSS data.