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Solar distillation is an environmental technique that uses solar energy to treat polluted water. In this context, two solar stills of the same size (0.5 x 0.5 m) were exposed to the sun i.e., under the same weather conditions to see the effect of small iron parts on the production of pure water. The results showed that the modified solar still SSM which contained iron pieces had an improvement rate of 23.46% compared to the reference solar still SSR.

Solar stills represent one of the effective solutions in remote regions that suffer from the problem of lack of fresh water, but the disadvantage of their type of distillation technologies is the low productivity of pure water per square meter of evaporation surface. During the night, the brine cools down because of the absence of solar radiation, which causes a discontinuity in the operation of the solar still, which no longer produces freshwater. Therefore, the current work aims to achieve the highest performance of solar stills. To achieve these, in the present work, the thermal behavior of a simple greenhouse solar still is coupled to a sensible heat storage tank to ensure the heating of the brine by energy stored and therefore to improve the performance of the solar still by the night production of distilled water. The results obtained are encouraging because the improvement rate was 27.70 % compared to the daily light sentence and the thermal efficiency of our system during the night phase was stable between 60 and 61 %.

Renewable energy‐based desalination systems are one of the main sources of human sustenance to address the climate damage of their fossil fuel‐based counterparts. Drinking water is not available in some remote areas and this causes a problem so there is a real need to develop simple and handy methods to solve this problem. Solar distillation is a simple, cost‐effective, and environmentally friendly process. It entails evaporating dirty water with free solar energy to obtain pure water. This study aims to achieve the highest performance of solar stills by using industrial coal debris as low‐cost and locally available energy storage materials. These coals help to increase the rates of absorption of solar radiation and improve the rates of heat transfer to the basin water. In addition, aluminum waste represents thermal storage materials. Two identical solar stills were exposed to the sun for 10 h, resulting in identical meteorological conditions. The first solar still was taken as the reference (RSS), and the second solar still which contains the carbon debris as low‐cost and locally available energy storage materials, it is the modified solar still (MSS). The results showed that carbon debris improved the accumulative productivity from 3.233 to 4.066 kg/m2, with an improvement rate of 25.76%. Also, the average thermal efficiency of RSS and MSS reached 27.98% and 34.79%, respectively. According to the economic analysis, the sum invested in the building of the two solar stills is recovered in 45 days for RSS and 35 days for MSS.