Solar Stills for Desalination of Water in Rural

International Journal of Environment and Sustainability ISSN 1927‐9566 | Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 21‐30 (2013) www.sciencetarget.com Solar Stills for Desalination of Water in Rural Households
Amitava Bhattacharyya*
Nanotech Research Facility, PSG Institute of Advanced Studies, Coimbatore – 641004, India
Abstract
Direct sunlight has been utilized long back for desalination of water. Solar distillation plants are used for
supplying desalinated water to small communities nearby coastal remote areas. Solar stills are easy to
construct, can be done by local people from locally available materials, simple in operation by unskilled
personnel, no hard maintenance requirements and almost no operation cost. But they have the
disadvantages of high initial cost, large land requirement for installation and have output dependent on the
available solar radiation. If there is no sunshine, the productivity is almost zero for conventional basin
type model. However, from the simplest basin type models of solar still in earlier days, researchers have
progressed a lot to increase its efficiency. Suitable modification of solar still can produce high output
using minimum areas of land and even in cloudy days. One of such upgraded version is capillary stills,
which are gaining popularity for their high output. The heart of capillary still is a fabric (woven or nonwoven) which facilitates rapid evaporation of water at minimum heating. An overview of solar stills and
capillary solar stills are discussed in this article.
Keywords: Capillary still, Desalination, Solar still
Introduction
Most of our earth surface is covered by water;
however, less than 1% of total available water is
fresh water which is mostly available in lakes,
rivers and underground. Again, about one-third of
that potential fresh water can only be used for
human needs due to mixed factors. Approximately
1.1 billion people in this world have inadequate
access to safe drinking water. There are 26
countries do not have enough water to maintain
agriculture and economic developments. At least
80% of arid and semiarid countries have serious
periodic droughts. A third of Africans and most of
Middle-East people live without enough water
(Bouchekima, 2003). The population growth coupled with industrialization and urbanization
results in an increasing demand for water. In India,
the scarcity of desalinated water is severe in
coastal areas, especially in the remote coastal
areas. Renewable energy based desalination plants
can solve this fresh water production problem
without causing any fossil energy depletion,
hydrocarbon pollution and environmental degradation. In spite of the limitations of being a dilute
source and intermittent in nature, solar energy has
the potential for meeting and supplementing
various energy requirements. Solar energy
systems; being modular in nature can be installed
in any capacity.
Different methods of desalination have been used
in several countries to resolve the crisis of drinking
water. A variety of desalination technologies has
been developed over the years on the basis of
thermal distillation, membrane separation, freezing, electrodialysis, etc. (Howe, 1974; Buros,
1980; Spiegler and Laird, 1980; Porteous, 1983;
Heitmann, 1990; Spiegler and El-Sayed, 1994;
Bruggen, 2003). Commercially, the two most
important technologies are based on the multi-
* Corresponding author: [email protected] 22 stage flash distillation (MSF) and reverse osmosis
(RO) processes. It is viewed that three processes –
MSF, RO, and multiple-effect distillation (MED) –
will be dominant and competitive in the future
(Rautenbach, 1992; Rautenbach et al., 1995). For
instance, in 1999 approximately 78% of the
world’s seawater desalination capacity was made
up of MSF plants while RO represented 10%
(Wangnick, 1998).
Solar distillation is a process where solar energy is
used to produce fresh water from saline or brackish
water for drinking, domestic and other purposes.
There are several distillation methods developed
for water desalination technology which differ in
simplicity, cost and applications. In the last
decades, many researchers have been conducted to
minimize the cost of this process, and several
methods have been developed. Among these
methods, solar distillation appears as one of the
best practical and the most economical, especially
for mass production of fresh water from high saline
water like seawater (Saidur et al., 2011). High
energy cost of the evaporation process contributes
most of the running expenditure in various
distillation methods. The advantage of solar
energy based small desalination plant is the
requirement of small quantities of energy which is
mostly collected from the sun. This should be the
most economical solution to provide potable water
to villagers residing at remote areas where proper
infrastructure is lacking. Solar distillation looks
very attractive as it utilizes the free source of
energy – the heat from the sun. Solar water
distillation has begun over a century ago. In 1872,
a solar plant with capacity around 4000 m2 has
been built in Chile and successfully ran for many
years. In addition, the small plastic solar stills have
been employed to provide potable water for life
rafts floating in the ocean during World War II.
Thus, the use of solar energy with water distillers
has a long history and the technology is well
improved and field tested throughout the world.
Solar stills can serve the purpose of basic drinking
water requirements of man. For countries like
India, the domestic solar still is a viable safe water
technology (Avvannavar et al., 2008). India, being
a tropical country is blessed with plenty of
sunshine. The average daily solar radiation varies
between 4 and 7 kWh/m2 for different parts of the
country. There are on an average 250–300 clear
Science Target Inc. www.sciencetarget.com © Bhattacharyya 2013 | Solar Stills for Desalination
sunny days in a year, thus it receives about 5000
trillion kWh of solar energy in a year (Arjunan et
al., 2009). From its operational feasibility and
associated costs, it can be inferred that solar still
technology is quite capable to provide desalinated
water to households in rural India. The fresh water
crisis is already evident in many parts of India in
varied scale and intensity at different times of the
year. Also, the demand for fresh water increases
with the growth of its population. The conventional
desalination technologies are expensive for the
production of small amount of fresh water. Also,
use of conventional energy sources is costly and
not always eco-friendly. Solar distillation is most
attractive and simplest technique among other
distillation processes especially for small-scale
units located at places where sufficient solar
energy is available.
Solar Stills
Solar still is possibly the oldest method of
desalination of water. Its principle of operation is
the greenhouse effect; the radiation from the sun
evaporates water inside a closed glass covered
chamber at a temperature higher than the ambient.
A schematic diagram of typical basin type solar
still is shown in figure 1.
Figure 1: Schematic diagram of a simple solar still
(Kaushal and Varun, 2010)
The saline water is fed on a black plate in the
lower portion of the solar distiller. The heat of the
sun causes the water to evaporate and water vapor
condenses to form purely distilled droplets of
water when it reaches the cool transparent leaning
surface made of glass or plastic. The droplets slide
down along the leaning surface and are collected
through special channels located under the leaning
surface.
International Journal of Environment and Sustainability | Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 21‐30 23
Figure 2: Classification of Solar Distillation Systems (redrawn from Shankar and Kumar, 2012)
This is the basic model. Over decades several other
designs mostly based on variations in the geometric configurations have been developed to
improve the efficiency of passive basin type solar
stills (Hamed et al., 1993). Shankar and Kumar
(2012) summarize the solar distillation systems in
a table as shown in figure 2.
In the broad category of solar stills, it is classified
into passive and active distillation systems (Tiwari
et al., 2003). In active systems, an external source
(such as a flat plate or concentrator collector) for
additional thermal energy is used to increase the
temperature of the saline water in the basin. This
class is suitable for commercial production of
distilled water. The passive distillation system does
not employ an outside source of energy. The
advantages of such solar distillers are their design
simplicity, low installation cost, independent water
production and simple maintenance. But they also
have several disadvantages such as low efficiency
and deposition of salt, scale and corrosion.
In passive distillation system, the advanced solar
stills prove more effective than conventional basin
type one especially during winter and rainy
seasons. One such example is coupled solar stills.
A simple solar still assisted by an external solar
collector shows increase in fresh water produc-
tivity with the increase in solar collector area of the
assisting device. The net efficiency of the coupled
system is higher than that of a similar simple still
by a value that depends mainly on the system
configuration and independent of the meteorological conditions (Zaki et al., 1993). In solar
diffusion driven desalination process, the solar heat
input is recycled in a unique dynamic mode which
eliminates the need for external cooling to improve
water production and reduce the specific energy
consumption. The delayed operating mode of such
system yields a fresh water production rate of 6.3
L/m2/d for the month of June in Florida with an
average specific energy consumption of 3.6
kWh/m3 (Alnaimat and Klausner, 2012). With the
low specific energy consumption, the solar
diffusion driven desalination can be competitive
with other small scale desalination units for
decentralized water production. Low temperature
phase-change desalination has several thermodynamic advantages and benefits (Gude and
Nirmalakhandan, 2009). The low-temperature
phase-change desalination process evaporates
saline water at near-ambient temperatures under
near-vacuum level pressures. In this system,
freshwater production rate of 0.25 kg/h (6 L/d) can
be sustained at evaporation temperatures as low as
40ºC. Hence, this process has the prospect to be
Science Target Inc. www.sciencetarget.com 24 driven by low-grade heat sources such as waste
process heat or solar collectors at temperatures as
low as 50ºC. Multi effect solar stills reutilize the
latent heat of condensation and further reduce the
heat requirement of the process.
Unfortunately, most of the approaches can only be
taken for centralized plants; the complexity and
cost of fabrication are beyond the reach of
common villagers. In Bangladesh Dr. M. Habibur
Rahman did a detailed research to establish low
lost solar desalination plants in coastal areas
(Rahman, 1998). They set up pilot plants in
Kaliganj, Satkhira. Though the stills are very basic
in nature but the cost involved is also very low.
Similar kind of effort has been taken care in
Rodrigues, Mauritius (Flendrig et al., 2009). A
thermoformed polyethylene solar still has been
developed at low cost with good output by
researchers from Unilever India.
Theoretical analyses of the heat and mass transfer
mechanisms inside this solar distiller have also
been developed. The measured performance was
compared with the results obtained by theoretical
analysis of the heat and mass transfer processes. In
order to evaporate 1 kg of water at a temperature of
30°C about 2.4 x 106 J is required, with 250 W/m2
solar radiation averaged over 24 h maximum 9 L/
m2/d water can be evaporated. Due to the heat
losses, the average daily yield usually never
exceeds 4-5 L/m2/d (Hamed et al., 1993).
Considerable energy must be provided to evaporate
the water. For an ideal system, neglecting the
thermal inertia, the yield is linearly dependent
upon the solar insulation. The thermal inertia
causes a significant drop in the system yield and
deviation from linearity. The results clearly show
that the efficiency increases with the increase of
solar radiation flux and with the increase of brine
temperature. An optimum value of feed water
(brine) is required for maximum efficiency. The
efficiency increases when there is a recovery of
latent heat of condensation.
Desalinated water produced through distillation or
evaporation techniques has high purity with a very
small amount of dissolved salts and minerals. For
this, the water is of poor taste and corrosive to the
materials commonly used in water distribution
systems such as metals and concrete. To overcome
the problems of aggressiveness and poor taste of
Science Target Inc. www.sciencetarget.com © Bhattacharyya 2013 | Solar Stills for Desalination
the distillate, it is sometimes recommended to go
for potabilization process before using. A number
of potabilization processes (Khawaji et al., 1994;
Kirby, 1987; World Health Organization, 1979;
Liberman and Liberman, 1999; Gabbrielli, 1981;
Ludwig et al., 1986; Yamauchi et al., 1987; AlRqobal and Al-Munayyis, 1989; Kutty et al., 1991)
have also been practiced or proposed which
includes controlled use of lime, chlorine, carbon
dioxide or air bubbling. This is mostly required for
medium and large scale desalination plants while
for domestic uses it may not be always essential.
Capillary Still Distiller
Highly efficient solar capillary distillation system
is the most promising to overcome all the problems
of conventional solar stills. Figure 3 describes the
components of a typical capillary still distiller unit.
A wick-type solar still consists of a porous black
fabric or film supported by a tray or a frame,
covered by glass or plastic sheet and in an airtight
enclosure. The still can be inclined or tilted to the
solar radiation to avoid dripping back the distillate
into the wick. Both insulated and un-insulated
models are used (Jundi, 1982). The porous,
blackened cloth serves as the surface for
absorption and evaporation. Distilled water
condenses on the inside surface of transparent
cover and collects in a trough at the lower edge of
the cover. A drain for the concentrated saline water
is set at the lower edge of the fabric. The flow rate
of the saline water is most critical as the efficiency
of capillary still increases with the decrease in flow
rate but too low flow rate leads to localized drying
of wick materials or dry spot development.
The advantages of the cloth are many. It increases
the surface area of the brine for more evaporation.
The thermal capacity of the still reduces which in
turn provides faster response to solar radiation. The
still can easily be tilted or shifted to intercept the
maximum solar radiation as compared to basin
type stills. In a diffusion type still, the distance
between the cloth surface and the top cover is
reduced to a few millimeters which increase the
evaporation rate (Elsayed, 1983). Lof (1980)
observed that a tilted wick still has high
productivity during the winter months as compared
to basin type stills.
International Journal of Environment and Sustainability | Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 21‐30 25
holding capacity. To encounter this problem, low
feed rate is required.
Figure 3: Cross sectional view of a capillary solar
still (1) Galvanised steel tray, (2) glass cover, (3)
support board, (4) polystyrene, (5) charcoal cloth,
(6) aluminum channel, (7) rubber gasket, (8) steel
strip, (9) styrofoam, (10) brine gutter, (11)
distillate gutter, and (12) distillate outlet channel
(Mahdi et al., 2011)
However, the wick-type stills also have some
technical problems such as development of dry
spots, precise control over brine flow is difficult
and wick material pores are clogged with time due
to salt deposition. If natural fiber cloth like jute
cloth is used for wicking, it degrades with time.
Both the natural and synthetics fibers have been
used to construct the capillary stills. Charcoal cloth
was also used which has the benefits of high heat
absorbency, surface area and micro porosity
(Mahdi, 1992). Earlier researchers use natural fiber
based thick fabrics. The most popular choice was
jute. Usually the fabrics were colored with black
dyes so that the heat absorption would be high.
Multi layer jute fabric was also used to hold more
water. However, as stated earlier, natural fibers
have the disadvantage of decomposing with time.
The durability of such fabrics is questionable under
continuous wet conditions. Again the heat energy
required to evaporate the water is also higher for
natural fibers than synthetic fibers as the water
molecules bound to hydrophilic fibers. Synthetic
fabrics perform better in these aspects. Only
disadvantage of synthetic fibers is their low water
A diffusion-type solar still was proposed by
Dunkle (1961) where he describes the advantages
of multiple effect diffusion still and indicated the
effect of different parameters on the still performance. The earlier reference of capillary stills
involved use of jute cloths for wicking as it can
hold more water, very cheap and long lasting as
compared to other natural fibers. Frick and
Sommerfeld (1973) used saline water trays to dip
the jute cloth along the width of the still. The jute
cloth remains wet due to capillary action and thus
the water distribution system is not required in this
design. Though an efficiency of 40 to 50 percent is
reported for this type of capillary solar still, it has a
problem of occasional drying of part of evaporating cloth. Moustafa et al. (1979) used a black
synthetic 2.5 cm thick mat to construct the wick
type solar still. They control the flow of water in
their wick with a photocell operated valve type
flow regulator. They compared this wick type solar
still with a basin type model and found that the
wick type has higher efficiency and faster response
than a basin type solar still. A linear relation
between daily production rates of different designs
of wick type and basin type solar stills was
observed by Hirschmann (1975). He also
concluded that wick type solar stills have higher
desalinated water production rates than basin type
stills. Tanaka et al. (1981) compared the productivity (both hourly and daily) of a tilted capillary
type solar still with that of a single roofed basin
type solar still, experimentally and theoretically,
under the same insolation and indoor simulated
conditions. The results established a significant
increase in productivity for the tilted capillary solar
still than the basin type.
To overcome the disadvantages of conventional
basin type solar stills, multi wick solar still (figure
4) has been developed by Sodha et al. (1981).
They have presented a design, analysis and performance investigation of a multiple wick solar still,
in which the wet surface is created by a series of
blackened jute cloth pieces of increasing length
separated by thin black polythene sheets. These
pieces are arranged along an inclined plane and
their upper edges are dipped in a saline water tank.
Suction by the capillary action of the cloth fiber,
provides a surface of the liquid and the cloth
Science Target Inc. www.sciencetarget.com 26 arrangement ensures that the entire surface is wet
at all times when irradiated by the sun. There is no
evaporation on the portion of cloth covered by
polythene sheet, hence the wetness retains in the
exposed portion of the jute cloth. A small amount
of water trapped in each interstice of cloth is
heated and so the water evaporates rapidly.
Figure 4: Cross-sectional view of FRP multi-wick
solar still (Tiwari et al., 2003)
Sodha et al. (1981) observed that, overall
efficiency of multiple wick solar still is 4% higher
than the basin type still. Their results also show
that, the still costs less than half of the cost of a
basin type still of same area and provides a higher
yield of distillate. Reddy et al. (1983) showed that,
a multiple solar still with a condenser arrangement
gives 15–25% higher production than the noncondenser type still. The excess vapor can be
condensed on the additional surface and reduces
the heat loads and temperature of the glass cover
which in turn enhances evaporation rate. This
concept has been implemented by Tiwari et al.
(1984) on multi wick solar still. The authors
concluded that, the double condensing, multiple
wick solar stills give nearly 20% higher productions than the simple wick solar still. However,
under cloudy and low intensity conditions both
stills show almost a similar performance. They also
confirmed that, the multiple-wick solar still is the
most economic and efficient among the existing
solar stills.
Gandhidasan (1983) studied about the dual
purposes of the wick-type solar stills. He has
proved theoretically that it is possible to use a
capillary still for application of solar distillation as
well as a regenerator for liquid desiccants. The
temperature difference between the glass cover and
wick surface is an important parameter for high
Science Target Inc. www.sciencetarget.com © Bhattacharyya 2013 | Solar Stills for Desalination
productivity. Efforts have made to lower down the
glass cover temperature as low as possible. A
double condensing multiple-wick solar still was
proposed by Tiwari et al. (1984) to overcome this
problem where an additional galvanized iron sheet
was placed below the blackened wet jute cloth with
a slight spacing. They extended this work of
galvanized iron sheet multiwick solar distillation
plant for the economical performance analysis
(Tiwari, 1984; Tiwari and Rao, 1985). They also
introduced fiber reinforced plastic instead of
galvanized sheet for a longer life of the still. Tiwari
and Yadav (1985) discussed the design and
performance of fiber reinforced plastic multiwick
solar distillation plant. Dhiman and Tiwari (1990)
proposed a multiwick solar still with water flowing
over the glass cover to cool down the surface. They
indicated that the yield of multiple-wick solar still
can be increased by 10% when water is flowing
over the glass cover in a very thin layer. They
obtained an increase in the output of the still with
the increase in water flow rate over the glass cover.
Double effect distillation in a multiwick solar still
has been developed by Singh and Tiwari (1992). In
this process, the latent heat of evaporation is
reused to increase the efficiency.
Sometimes, vertical wick type solar stills are more
economical if one considers the cost of land,
especially in cities. Coffey (1975) pointed out
several possible designs of vertical wick solar stills
such as floating type, ground suction type and feed
from base type. An inclined stepped solar still has
been developed by Akhtamov et al. (1978). It has
housing with double glazing with inclined
blackened trays divided by baffles. Water passes
through the double glazing gap from its bottom to
the top to feed the still. The latent heat of
evaporation released by condensation passes
through the glass to the water. Its average
efficiency was found to be around 65 percent.
Elsayed (1983) compared the predicted transient
performance of a solar operated diffusion type still
with a roof type still. He concluded that the
diffusion still is superior to the roof-type still in
both production rate and operating efficiency.
Kiatsiriroat et al. (1987) calculated the transient
performance and mass transfer of a vertical type
solar still. The effects of climate, design and
operating conditions were studied on the
performance of a blackened jute cloth based
capillary solar stills by Yeh and Chen (1986). They
International Journal of Environment and Sustainability | Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 21‐30 used an artificial radiation source for the study.
They found that the solar still productivity
decreases with increase in input water flow rate.
They also concluded that the wind speed and
ambient temperature have little effect on the
productivity of the still.
Bouchekima et al. (1998) further developed the
capillary solar still by using a very thin, single
layer synthetic fabric for the wicking. Figure 5
describes the schematic of such capillary film
distiller. The solar distiller is very simple, handy,
applicable for domestic production and easy to
maintain.
Figure 5: Schematic diagram of capillary solar
still (Bouchekima, 2002)
In this still, the thin fabric was held in contact with
the overhanging plate by the interfacial tension. A
capillary film of saline water was formed at the
plate-fabric interface. Different low, constant flow
rates of saline solution were achieved by using
different diameters of hypodermic syringe needles.
During evaporation, the thin flowing film of saline
water splits and forms a set of independent rivulets
separated by dry zones. As the wetted zones
undergoing evaporation are colder the vapor
condenses better on the other side of that plate.
The efficiency of solar stills is strongly dependant
on several factors other than their design and
principle. The factors like input saline water temperature, outside temperature, airflow, intensity of
available solar radiation, etc. have strong influence
on the solar still performance. Table 1 summarizes
the efficiencies of different types of solar stills
experimentally found by the researchers for their
designed and installed set up. The references depict
that the efficiency of simple basin type solar stills
27
can be improved significantly by changing its
materials and design. However, the wick type
capillary stills have more promise than the basin
types. The installation cost of capillary solar still is
higher but the improved efficiency justifies the
investment.
Table 1
Efficiency of various types of solar stills
Type of solar still
Output
efficiency
Reference
Simple basin type
solar still
30%
Sodha et al.,
1981
Single slope solar still
23% to 31%
Dwivedi and
Tiwari, 2008
Double slope solar still
25% to 34%
Dwivedi and
Tiwari, 2008
Multiple wick solar still
34%
Sodha et al.,
1981
Low cost
thermoformed solar
still
39%
Flendrig et al.,
2009
Double effect multi
wick solar still
50% to 60%
Singh and Tiwari,
1992
Capillary film distiller
(one stage)
50% to 55%
Bouchekima et
al., 1998
Tilted wick type solar
still
53%
Mehdi et al., 2011
Conclusion
The design development of both active and passive
solar stills accelerates more and more solar energy
utilization for desalination of water in a cost
effective manner. For rural people in remote areas,
passive solar still specially the wick or capillary
type seems to be an attractive choice to get water
for drinking and other domestic purposes.
Advances have made to improve the evaporation
rate of a capillary solar still by changing the fiber
and fabric. From multi layer thick fabric
researchers move to very thin fabric. Again the
fiber used now is hydrophobic one rather than the
hydrophilic. This enhances the durability of the
still fabric. The design complicacy is not desirable
for the rural domestic applications. Hence, the
material developments should be the point of focus
for future research in this area.
Science Target Inc. www.sciencetarget.com 28 © Bhattacharyya 2013 | Solar Stills for Desalination
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