Experimental Validation of Thermal Analysis of Solar Still with Dye

Abstract

A simple straight forward transient analysis of a single basin solar still has been presented by incorporating the effect of presence of dye and attenuation of solar flux with depth in the water mass of the basin. An explicit expression for water and glass temperature, hourly yield and efficiency of solar still have been derived. Effect of various parameters viz temperature dependence of internal heat transfer coefficients, water depth, absorptivity of water mass and basin liner have been discussed in detail. An experiment has been conducted to validate the theoretical results obtained by present theory. It is concluded that (i) there is a good agreement between theoretical results and experimental observation for 0.02 m water depth. (ii) there is a significant effect of dye at larger depth which is in accordance with the experimental observation obtained by Sodha et al.(1.)