Due to the greater growth of population and industrial developments especially from the early 20th century, people living in remote villages suffer with shortage of drinking water. People living in urban and rural areas depend on surface and ground water sources, where these sources are majorly polluted by industrial waste. The use of reverse osmosis technique and other conventional technique appears to be a costlier method and requires a very large land mass. An economical method of converting the saline water to portable water is by using solar energy. Solar still desalination is one method of converting saline water into potable water by evaporation and condensation. Many researchers carried out extensive studies on the solar still desalination technique and this paper communicates a detailed review about the existing desalination technique by solar energy.Key words: Solar still, economic, water source, energy, developments
INTRODUCTIONEarth is almost covered with water of which 97% salt water, 2% trapped in the form of glaciers and polar ice caps and only 1% of water for drinking purpose for our survival. Plants, animals and human being need water to avoid dehydration, since dehydration kills faster than starvation. Consumption of unhygienic water cause health problems and even death and for a small scale production of fresh water in urban and rural areas solar desalination is the best method (Kumar et al., 2015;Arunkumar et al., 2015). As ground and surface water sources are depleting by continuous usage the need of drinking water is more. Figure 1 shows the major water sources of the world.There is a great need of fresh water for humans, as they are the important phenomenon in dayto-day life. Due to urbanization, industrialization and increase in population growth the need of drinking water is higher. The possible ways of getting pure water is from rivers, lakes, wells, rains etc, as these kinds must be purified consuming. The purification of water involves the removal of dissolved or microbes which can easily spread water borne diseases. The insoluble substances are removed by sand filtration and the microbes are killed through chlorination and by boiling. Solar desalination does all the three function. The another method of conversion of backrish water into purified water for drinking purpose is using membrane or phase change process of desalination. Earlier these process uses boiler to generate power or heat to drive the membrane process to get fresh water. In the current context, solar energy is used to drive these techniques using solar photo