| Abstract | ABSTRACT
The present paper concerns with enhancing productivity of basin type solar still through
experimental investigation. Therefore, two solar stills are designed and constructed to study
the performance of two suggested solar desalination systems. The
fi
rst one is a conventional
still and the second is a modi
fi
ed still uses a rotating fan with a vertical shaft. A DC-motor pow-
ered by a small photovoltaic (PV) system is used to rotate the fan. The in
fl
uence of the rotational
speed of the fan and the depth of saline water on the performance of the still is investigated
experimentally. The experiments were conducted with fan rotational speeds of 30, 35, 40 and 45
rpm and saline water depths of 1, 3, 5 and 7 cm. The results indicate that the daily productiv-
ity of still increases with increasing rotational speed of the fan and the maximum di
ff
erence
of daily productivity between fan and conventional solar stills is achieved at depth of saline
water of 3 cm (with rotation). Also it is found that using rotating fan in the solar still increases
the productivity by 25% at 3 cm and 45 rpm. In this case the daily e
ffi
ciency and estimated
cost of 1 l of distillate for fan and conventional solar stills are approximately 38%–0.0447$ and
35.5%–0.049$, respectively |