Harnessing evacuated tube technology for enhanced solar still: A comprehensive review

Abstract

The simplest and solar energy-based desalination method, solar still desalination, is presented in response to the expanding need for freshwater. However, as the evaporation process is essential to the functioning of solar stills, effective evaporation upgrades are required to raise the solar desalination ability. Using evacuated tube technology for water heating results in an improved evaporation process that makes solar still desalination replicable. This work conducts a review study on the coupling of this technology with the various types of solar stills. The performance of each type of solar still in conjunction with a solar heater is examined throughout the study, along with the viability of doing so economically. Furthermore, various environmental studies are offered on this kind of assembly to examine how it affects reducing carbon emissions. Additionally, the advantages of combining each form of solar still with the heaters are examined. Moreover, several evacuated tube heater designs, including tank-based, parabolic collector-based, and direct connection to the solar still, also referred to as natural mode, are demonstrated throughout the paper. Proper coupling resulted in yield, energy, and exergetic efficiencies reaching 20.95 L/m², 65.48, and 6.67 % which were higher than those of basic solar still by 431.7, 57.82, and 74.61 %, respectively. Besides, a bibliometric analysis is conducted using the VOSviewer tool to demonstrate the contribution and trend regarding solar collector-based solar stills.