Experimental Study on Enhancing the Productivity of Solar Still Using Locally Available Material as a Storage Medium

This experimental study focuses on the effect of pebbles as an energy storage medium on the performance of a solar distillation system. Two single basin solar stills are fabricated with an effective area of 0.5 m2, the glass cover was tilted at 10° with respect to the horizontal. The experiments on the still were carried out under the same climatic conditions for two different modes of operations, (1) conventional still and (2) modified still (pebbles as storage medium). From the study, it could be concluded that (1) the productivity of solar still is increases 9.5 % when pebbles are used as storage medium (2) the maximum amount of heat losses occurs in the solar still is the combined effect of radiation and convection heat transfer from glass to ambient (3) pebbles have the potentiality to store the heat during high solar intensity period and to release the stored energy to water when the solar intensity is low. © 2016, The Institution of Engineers (India).