Improving design of the continuous solar desalination unit
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Date
2020-09-10
Authors
Sbaih, Iman
Mohammed, Saja
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Abstract
Adequate quality and reliability of drinking water supply is a fundamental need of all people. Industries and Agriculture need fresh water as well. Despite water covers 70% of the earth surface the fresh accessible water doesn’t exceed 3% of the total existing amount of water on the earth, this is due to the lack of accessibility or the high salinity of sea water. Therefore, improving a feasible and ecofriendly desalination process becomes an urgent need. Solar distillation presents a promising alternative for saline water desalination. A group of environmental engineering students designed an innovative continuous solar desalination unit (CSDU) which was constructed at the roof of the engineering faculty building at An-Najah National University, this project aims to improve their design and to investigate its productivity after modifications.
Many modifications were made and the productivity was measured along three months
, promising results were achieved. The maximum and minimum evaporation fluxes measured were 7.663 and 1.43 (L/m2.day), respectively.
In addition, results indicated that the evaporation rate was highly affected by weather conditions. and highly effected by increasing the belt speed.
Finally, a double tubular condenser was designed, and the following values were obtained 1.31 m/s was the velocity in the tube and 1.72 m/s in the shell. The pressure drop was 2.4and 0.078 kPa in tube & shell, respectively. The length and the outside diameter of the tube was 3.2 m and 0.3 m. where the diameter for the shell side was 0.62m.
the expected total capital cost was estimated it’s around 1600 NIs while the annual operating cost is 1912 NIS/yr.