Numerical simulation of a heat pump assisted regenerative solar still with PCM heat storage for cold climates of Kazakhstan

Abstract

A numerical model has been proposed in this work for predicting the energy per-formances of the heat pump assisted regenerative solar still with phase changing material heat storage under Kazakhstan climates. The numerical model is based on energy and mass balance. A new regenerative heat pump configuration with phase changing material heat storage is proposed to improve the performance. A comparison of results has been made between the conventional solar still and heat pump assisted regenerative solar still with phase changing material. The numerical simulation was performed for wide range of ambient temperatures be-tween -30 and 30 °C with wide range of solar intensities between 100 and 900 W/m2. The numerical simulation results showed that heat pump assisted re-generative solar still is more energy efficient and produce better yield when com-pared to the conventional simple solar still. The influences of solar intensity, am-bient temperature, different phase changing materials, heat pump operating tem-peratures are discussed. The predicted values were found to be in good agree-ment with experimental results reported in literature.