ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: Fresh water is the component required for the survival of many living organisms. Though 71% of the earth’s surface is covered by water, only 3.5% is available for human needs, with the remaining 96.5% in the form of oceans. Large quantities of water are consumed by industries due to rapid industrialization, thus polluting the fresh water and further causing its scarcity. To meet the demand, solar energy can be used to convert seawater into fresh water in a solar distillation unit using a solar still. The solar still should possess high absorptivity so that it captures the maximum solar energy and converts the seawater to fresh water. In this paper, the effect of different materials such as black paint, paraffin wax, coal bed, sand and ceramic packings, as coating materials in various combinations to the base aluminum basin, was studied in a detailed way. Energy balance and heat transfer coefficients were estimated for all the cases. Further, the overall efficiency was also estimated for all the cases and compared. The black paint coated basin (base case) has shown the least efficiency (42.19%) among all considered cases, and the basin coated with the combination of black paint, sand and ceramics has shown the highest efficiency (65.06%).
