Thermal analysis of water distillation system using PV/T collector combined single basin still

This paper introduces a novel photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) system, in which the water used to cool solar cells (PV cells) is used to provide hot water at night for a solar passive single basin still - a distillation device with simple design and operation. This proposed PV/T system helps the solar still produce distilled water at both day and night, hence increasing the distilled yield in comparison with that of conventional solar still. The article also presents a simulation program written in MATLAB based on the thermal analysis equations of PV/T system equipment, thereby calculating the parameters of the equipment as well as the power output and distilled water of the whole PV/T system. The comparison of the calculated results and the experimental results shows that the written simulation program has high accuracy and reliability. The errors between experimental and simulation results are around 4.24%-7.11%. Then, the simulation program is used to calculate the optimal volume of water in the tank and thereby predicts the production of distilled water at typical days of 6 months from January to June. The simulation results shows that the use of hot water from PV/T collector to distil water at night increases the output of distilled water from 35.2% to 41.7% compared to that of traditional solar single basin stills.