Heat transfer analysis of hybrid active solar still with water flowing over glass cover

Abstract

The aim of this research is to carry out the heat transfer analysis of PVT hybrid active solar still (HASS) at different water depth to obtain maximum output. Experimentation is performed for validation of thermal modeling with and without flowing water, having water depth of 0.15m in the solar still basin. During experimentation, water flows above the glass cover. Theoretically calculated values of basin water, basin liner, glass temperature and yield obtained using thermal modeling are very near to the experimental values having correlation coefficients 0.988, 0.981, 0.999 and 0.985 respectively. It is also found that thermal efficiency and daily exergy output increases by 4% and 8.2% respectively for this hybrid system whose glass cover is getting cooled by water flowing over it. Theoretical calculation for distillate output of the system was also calculated out for various climatic conditions of India using developed thermal modeling and it is found that proposed system gives higher annual yield of 2756.67 kg/m2 for the climate of Mumbai. The experimental uncertainty of the HASS is obtained as 14.82%.