Journal Press India^®

Author Details ( * ) denotes Corresponding author

Water is essential for all living creatures. It is abundantly available on earth surface but quantity of potable water is very less. Solar distillation is environmental friendly, economical and cheap water purification techniques. This technique is not commercialized yet because of its lower distillate output. In this communication weir-type cascade solar still with phase change material (PCM) are designed for increasing the productivity of still. Effect of three different phase change material (Bees wax, stearic acid and palmitic acid) of different melting point (61 oC, 55 oC and 54.3 oC respectively) have been studied on the performance of cascade weir type solar still. Maximum productivity of 2.35 litre/m2/day has been obtained with the use of palmitic acid as phase change material with the still. Mean values of convective, evaporative, radiative heat transfer coefficient with thermal efficiency of still has also been calculated and found to be 1.193, 13.13, 6.913 W/m2 oC and 24.58% respectively. The productivity of weir-type solar still with PCM is observed 33.69% higher than conventional still. Thermal efficiency of still with PCM is 35.46 % more than still without PCM.

Keywords

Solar Still, Weir-Type, Solar Distillation, Heat Transfer Coefficients, Efficiency.

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