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T. Arunkumar 1 and K. Vinothkumar 2 and Amimul Ahsan 3 and R. Jayaprakash 1 and Sanjay Kumar 4
Recommended by S. P. Ahrenkiel and S. Senthilarasu
1, Solar Energy Laboratory, Department of Physics, Sri Ramakrishna Mission Vidyalaya, College of Arts and Science, Coimbatore 641020, India
2, Research and Development (Renewable Energy), NSP Green Energy Technologies, Pvt. Ltd. Chennai 603 209, India
3, Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Green Engineering and Sustainable Technology Lab, Institute of Advanced Technology, University Putra, 43400 Serdang, Malaysia
4, Centre for Renewable Energy and Environmental Research, P.O. Box-5, Muzaffarpur 842001, India
Received 4 April 2012; Accepted 3 May 2012
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
Solar energy can be used either for seawater desalination by producing the thermal energy required to drive the phase change processes or by generating the electricity required to drive the membrane processes. Solar desalination systems are classified into direct and indirect collection systems. As their name imply, direct-collection systems use solar-energy to produce distillate directly in the solar collector, whereas in indirect collection systems, two sub-systems are employed. Conventional desalination systems are similar to solar systems because the same type of equipment is applied. The prime difference is that in the former, either a conventional boiler is used to provide the required heat or mains electricity is used to provide the required electric power, whereas in the latter, solar energy is applied [1]. Many papers have addressed solar stills of various configurations, including [2-6]. More specific studies include a hemispherical solar still [7, 8], pyramid solar still [9, 10], double-basin solar still [11-15], triple basin solar still [16], multiple basin solar still [17, 18], inverted absorber solar still [19-22], tubular solar stills [23-26], compound parabolic concentrator (CPC) solar still [27], weir-type cascade solar still [28, 29], wick-type [30], inverted absorber solar still [31], portable active solar still [32], integrated basin solar still with a sandy reservoir [33], titled wick-type with flat plate bottom reflector [34], fin [35], active vibratory solar still [36], and a plastic solar still [37].
In this paper, the fabrication and performance evaluation...