Performance assessment of the hemispherical solar distillers with the extended cylindrical iron fins: An experimental investigation

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to obtain the best arrangement of new extended cylindrical iron fins that achieve the highest productivity of hemispherical solar distillers. To achieve this, extended cylindrical iron fins with a diameter of 1.2 cm were placed at various distances on the bottom basin of the hemispherical solar distiller (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 cm). To obtain the optimal distance between the extended cylindrical iron fins that achieve the highest productivity, three configurations of the hemispherical solar distillers were designed, tested, and compared in terms of performance. The first is a traditional hemispherical distiller, while the second and third are hemispherical distillers with extended cylindrical iron fins spaced at different distances. Experiments are carried out over three days and for a total of 12 h, for each day we tested two different distances and compare to the traditional hemispherical distiller at the same climate conditions. The experimental results showed that increasing the number of extended cylindrical iron fins increases the yield; that is, the best yield is obtained when the basin is completely filled with fins (0 cm). Furthermore, when compared to a traditional hemispherical distiller (4.80 L/m2/day), the cumulative yield of the hemispherical solar distiller with extended cylindrical iron fins at distances of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 cm reached to 6.30, 6.10, 5.90, 5.65, 5.40, and 5.10 L/m2/day, respectively. These results presented that, the utilization of extended cylindrical iron fins represent the good option which improved the cumulative yield by 31.25, 27.08, 22.92, 17.71, 12.50, and 6.25% for a fins distance of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 cm, respectively. These results showed that the use of extended cylindrical iron fins with zero distance represents the optimum configuration that achieves the highest productivity; in this case, the absorber surface after installing contiguous extended cylindrical iron fins is characterized as similar to the semi-circular corrugated surface.