Experimental studies on solar distillation systems under Indian climatic conditions

In this paper performance studies of five types of solar still systems have been presented. The experiments were carried out in the year 2001 and 2002 at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India. On the basis of experimental results, it is observed that the double slope multiwick solar still operates at a higher temperature and gives monthly average improvement of 30% to 50% over conventional single slope solar still. This is a result of its very low heat capacity caused by the relatively small thermal mass per unit area in multiwick solar stills. However the annual performance obviously goes down due to the quite less distillate output during July, August and mid September. The reason for the low output is attributed to the cloudy weather and rainy season.