Abstract:
A new design of the basin-type solar still with the objective of increasing productivity is proposed. The idea is to use a rotating vertical black wick (VRW) in front of the distiller back wall that will act as an additional absorption and evaporation zone. The combination of the capillary action of the wick and the rotary action within the distiller significantly improves the productivity and thermal efficiency of the conventional solar distiller. A series of experimental tests was carried out at the meteorological station of M'sila to evaluate the contribution of this rotating wick to the improvement of the distiller's
performance. The comparison with the simple solar distiller shows that production of the modified distiller has been increased by about 14.7% in summer and 51.1% in winter. In addition, the economic study shows that the estimated cost of the distilled water is approximately 0.011 $/kg and the payback of the proposed solar distiller is estimated at 78 days. Due to the lack of data on solar irradiation, and the need for this parameter to simulate their effect on the performance of solar systems, interest has been brought to the study of two types of estimation models of global solar irradiation existing in the literature. For the first type, which is based on the duration of sunshine, the linear, quadratic and cubic models were used
to estimate global solar irradiation for the Ksar Challala site (latitude 35.10N). The results show that the linear model has the smallest errors by contribution to the other two and can thus be retained for the site of Ksar Challala. For the second type, which is based on sunshine duration and sun height, the Sivkov model
was used for three sites in Algeria, Constantine, Dar El-Beida and Ksar Challala, of respective latitudes 36.17N, 36.41N and 35.10N. The results show that this one is well adapted to estimate the monthly average global solar irradiation for the north of Algeria with a good degree of precision.
