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In order to remedy the shortage of drinking water in southern Algeria where solar irradiance and brackish water are abundant, three solar stills are installed in aim to improve their performance by applying the technique of photo-catalysis, since this application in solar heat transfer processes particularly in the solar distillation of brackish water is promising mostly the use of pure and/or mixed metal oxides which has led to encouraging results in the process engineering laboratory of Ouargla University; so, what is the new in this paper? Here, two metal oxides: ZnO and CuO are added separately with varying masses in order to compare their yields with that of the conventional unit where: 20, 40, and 60 g of each metal oxide are added separately to each unit containing the same constant volume of 3.6 L of brackish water; this showed that the two metal oxides are more effective at their low concentrations. Moreover, adding 20 g of ZnO and 20 g of CuO separately in two different units improves the daily production by 79.39% and 74.76%, respectively, compared to the reference case; additionally, photo-catalyzed units produced a high quality distillate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drinkable fresh water is essential for life on earth. Getting potable water is one of the major problems facing humanity in many parts of the world especially in remote and arid zones as southern Algeria. Nowadays, the best non-conventional method and environmentally friendly manner to purify brackish or sea waters is the solar distillation. This experimental work aims to improve the yield of conventional single-slope solar still with by providing units separately by different metal oxides namely: copper oxide (CuO), iron oxide (Fe2O3), and zinc oxide (ZnO) with different weight concentrations (0.04%, 0.08%, 0.12%, and 0.16%). Experimental results carried out at Ouargla University reveal that those metal oxides play the role of photo-catalysts whatever their concentrations. The productivity of test stills increases by 22.43%, 16.64%, and 13.02%, respectively for CuO, Fe2O3, and ZnO compared with the conventional still for a weight concentration of 0.16% of metal oxide and 1 cm of brackish water depth. After physical analysis, the distillate produced by the three units is high quality compared with that produced without metal oxides' presence. The estimated cost of 1 kg of distillate is respectively: 0.0090, 0.0089, and 0.0096$ compared with 0.0092$ in the baseline case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]