Comprehensive review on the prediction of thermal behavior of solar stills with diverse designs

Abstract

Fabrication of solar still is quite costlier and time consuming process that motivates the researchers to execute mathematical and numerical simulations of solar stills to determine the yield. Software's plays crucial role to analyze and predict the thermal behavior of solar stills. Simulation techniques are inexpensive and time saving as compared to experimental investigations. Therefore, in this article an attempt is made to present a review of the most recent numerical studies on diverse designs of solar stills and use of various softwares with its benefit. A variety of software's are used for modeling and development of solar stills namely CFD (ANSYS-FLUENT), MATLAB, FORTRAN, and SPSS. To determine dynamic behavior of fluid and temperature distribution over solar still CFD software is used while to develop a mathematical model and to determine various parameters inside the solar still MATLAB is used. FORTRAN is similar to MATLAB used to analyze hourly changes in the parameters like change in the water temperature and distillate output. SPSS is used for handling the statistical data.