Electrohydrodynamic water desalination: Evaluating the productivity and energy consumption

Basin-type solar stills lose their source of energy over nights which leads to very weak performance. In this paper, performance and energy consumption of an electrohydrodynamic desalination system for nightly production of fresh water in high-humidity regions are numerically examined. To solve the governing equations of a three-phase problem with interfacial phase change, a solver has been developed in the OpenFOAM platform. Effects of the applied voltage and the relative humidity are investigated and the shielding effect is also considered. Results show that in May when a solar still achieves its best performance in Bandar-e Jask, the electrohydrodynamic desalination system could produce 14.2% and 25.9% of production of the solar still by applying voltages of 15 and 18 kV to the wires. In December, for a voltage of 18 kV, the electrohydrodynamic desalination unit produces 53.1% of production of a solar still while the electrohydrodynamic desalination unit only operates for 6 h during nights consuming very low amount of energy. The results reveal that using the corona discharge to increase evaporation is an efficient method to be used along with solar desalination to produce fresh water.