AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF THE PERFORMANCE OF A FINNED TUBE SOLAR COLLECTOR ON A SINGLE SLOPE SOLAR STILL

Water that can be consumed is necessary for life to exist. One of the biggest issues that humanity faces globally is access to drinking water, particularly in rural and dry areas. Solar distillation is now the most effective nonconventional and environmentally benign way to fi lter brackish or marine waters. This experimental work seeks to increase the yield of traditional single-slope solar stills using fi nned tube solar collectors. Experimental results carried out under the climatic conditions of Najaf, Iraq (32 (cid:1) 1 38.55 00 N/44 (cid:1) 19 ′ 59.22 ′ ′ E) showed that the maximum basin water temperature of fi nned tubes solar collector [modify solar still (MSS)] is 64.1 (cid:1) C and for conventional solar still (CSS) is 45.8 (cid:1) C at 14:00 p.m. This behavior is the same for the other temperatures (vapor, inner glass surface, and outer glass surface). Also, the water and inner glass surfaces ’ temperature difference (T w -T g,in ) is 3.9 (cid:1) C for MSS and 1.8 (cid:1) C for CSS. The daily productivity of MSS is 4.766 l/m 2 day, with an enhancement of 65.12% as compared with that of CSS. The exergy ef fi ciency increases with time to reach its maximum value of 32.53% at 15:00 p.m. for the MSS and 13.78% at 14:00 p.m. for the CSS. With respect to cost analysis, employing a fi nned tube collector alongside CSS affords the lowest cost per liter of distillate. Speci fi cally, the cost is equivalent to 0.04 USD.