Comprehensive Review on Solar Stills—Latest Developments and Overview

Abstract

This up-to-date and comprehensive literature study provides a rich overview of recent developments in several solar still types. This review examines a large number of theoretical, experimental, and computational studies connected to the single-slope, double-slope, solar still with a condenser, hybrid, and other limited types of solar stills. To make the work more relevant to readers, the authors provide a panoramic view of solar still varieties as well as a complete overview of the most recently published review papers in the solar stills field. The most important conclusions drawn from prior research are carefully discussed and outlined in a useful table to give interested researchers a good road map of many various sorts of solar stills and encourage them to pursue new research avenues in this field. The foremost key results of the evaluated work are presented in a table for readers’ convenience. The results indicated that the absorption in the basin was improved by adding charcoal, matt, sponge, jute and cotton clothes, dye, wick, porous or energy-storing material, black rubber, and floating absorber sheet. Moreover, the productivity of solar stills was significantly improved by using the inclined external flat-plate reflector, combined stills, condenser, sun tracking system, reflectors, greenhouse, hot water tank, solar collector, heat exchanger, and solar pond. Further, heat loss was minimized by re-utilizing the latent heat of condensation, cover cooling, and increasing the insulation thickness.

Experimentation on enhancement of solar still performance

“…It is worth mentioning that some of the above three techniques used to enhance solar still performance have been mentioned in several review works on solar stills which appeared in literature during the last decade. These include Muftah et al (2014), Manchanda and Kumar (2015), Kalita et al (2016), Ithape et al (2017), Essa et al (2022), Ayoobi and Ramezanizadeh (2022) and Younis et al (2022) Results reported about increases in still performance metrics using one of the above three particular designs show wide variations. Increases in still efficiencies in the range of 10 -300% have been reported in some cases.…”