Search

Earth is the densest planet of the solar system with total area of 510.072 million square Km. Over 71.68% of this area is covered with water leaving a scant area of 28.32% for human to inhabit. The fresh water accounts for only 2.5% of the total volume and the rest is the brackish water. Presently, the world is facing chief problem of lack of potable water. This issue can be addressed by converting brackish water into potable through a solar distillation process and solar still is specially assigned for this purpose. Efficiency of a solar still explicitly depends on its design parameters, such as wall material, chamber depth, width and slope of the zcondensing surface. This study was aimed at investigating the solar still parameters using CFD modeling and experimental validation. The simulation data of ANSYS-FLUENT was compared with actual experimental data. A close agreement among the simulated and experimental results was seen in the presented work. It reveals that ANSYS-FLUENT is a potent tool to analyse the efficiency of the new designs of the solar distillation systems.

A passive thermosyphon heating system was designed, fabricated and tested for its thermal performance in semi-arid and four-season climate of Pakistan. The heating system design was based on a two-stage storage and natural thermosyphon circulation of the water. The objective of the study was to enhance the heating performance of the thermosyphon systems by using a semicircular steel pot collector, water carrying copper coil cover, two step water storage, and side mirror reflectors. The experiments were conducted during April to July 2014 when ambient temperature was reported to vary between 32°C and 44°C. In continuous flow mode operation, the hot water temperature remained between 46°C and 78°C. Since water temperature in the range of 45°C to 50°C is considered suitable for the domestic use, the presented design can easily reach the temperatures even higher than those acceptable for the domestic use.