Solar stills: A comprehensive review of designs, performance and material advances

Techno-economic analysis of solar stills using integrated fuzzy analytical hierarchy process and data envelopment analysis

“…Though many solar stills are technically strong (high productivity) yet they are not economically strong (high fabrication, operation and maintenance cost) and hence do not find a place among the top solar stills. When the productivity is considered as the only criteria, then hybrid solar still, solar still sun tracking and solar still with solar pond is found to be at the top (Dsilva Winfred Rufuss et al, 2016;, but when the other parameters such as fabrication cost, economic impact, etc are considered then pyramid type solar still, still with PVT, still with NPCM (CuO, TiO 2 ) and PCM goes to the top five position with 100, 100, 88, 88 and 77% relative efficiency respectively. It is inferred that, solar still with copper oxide requires a reduction in the skilled labour requirement or an improvement in its commercial potential and economic impact to reach the top position.…”

“…Desalination is an essential response to the growing water scarcity problem. It has been reported in our previous paper (Dsilva Winfred Rufuss et al, 2016) that, by the year 2030 half of the world population will experience severe water crisis. There are various desalination process available to desalinate the saline water, of which solar still holds its significance owing to its enviro-economic friendly nature .…”

“…Solar still with Nano PCM (Copper oxide) and solar still with Nano PCM (Titanium dioxide) come next with the efficiency of 0.8847 and 0.8846 respectively. Solar still with graphene oxide, though technically the best solar still (Dsilva Winfred Rufuss et al, 2016;, is completely ruled out since its efficiency is only 0.487. In the case of NPCM based solar still (solar still with copper oxide and titanium dioxide) [ranked no.3 and 4] to reach the efficiency frontier there is 12% lag.…”

“…Solar desalination is a type of desalination process in which evaporation and condensation processes are driven by solar energy. Among the various types of solar desalination processes, solar stills are significant because of their low environmental impact, technical simplicity, low capital and maintenance cost (Dsilva Winfred Rufuss et al, 2016). Solar still can be used in extremely adverse environments, where there is no source of power for running the otherwise efficient desalination process (Dsilva Winfred Rufuss et al, 2016).…”

An ode to polyethylene

“…4(a)]. [16][17][18] Water vapor, which is free of salts, bacteria, and other contaminants, can then be condensed and collected, thus providing a clean source of fresh potable water. Traditionally, glass panels have been integrated as transparent covers of solar stills, whose internal surfaces were also used to condense vapor.…”