All over the world, access to potable water to the people are narrowing down day by day. Most of the human diseases are due to polluted or non-purified water resources. Even today, under developed countries and developing countries face a huge water scarcity because of unplanned mechanism and pollution created by manmade activities. Water purification without affecting the ecosystem is the need of the hour. In this context, many conventional and non-conventional techniques have been developed for purification of saline water. Among these, solar distillation proves to be both economical and eco-friendly technique particularly in rural areas. Many active distillation systems have been developed to overcome the problem of lower distillate output in passive solar stills. This article provides a detailed review of different studies on active solar distillation system over the years. Thermal modelling was done for various types of active single slope solar distillation system. This review would also throw light on the scope for further research and recommendations in active solar distillation system.

Active solar distillation—A detailed review

A review on solar stills for brine desalination

Utilization of thermoelectric cooling in a portable active solar still — An experimental study on winter days

Renewable energy is considered as a solution for mitigating climate change and environmental pollution; however, an important problem of the application of renewable energy systems (RESs) is that the evaluation of the sustainability of these systems is extremely complex. In order to assess the sustainability of renewable energy systems comprehensively, the use of sustainability indicators (SIs) is often necessary. Since sustainability indicators are necessary to reflect various aspects of sustainability, the development of a general sustainability indicator (GSI) including many basic sustainability indicators (BSIs) becomes critical. In this paper, the methods of selection, quantification, evaluation and weighting of the basic indicators as well as the methods of GSI aggregation are reviewed. The advantages and disadvantages of each method are discussed. Based on these discussion and the analysis of the uncertainties of sustainability assessment, an effective framework and its procedures of the development of GSI for renewable energy systems is presented. This GSI is not only able to evaluate all the sustainability criteria of RESs, but also can provide numerical results of sustainability assessment for different objective systems. The proposed framework in this study can be used as a guidance of the development of sustainability indicator for various renewable energy systems.

Development of a general sustainability indicator for renewable energy systems: A review

Experimental study of a novel portable solar still by utilizing the heatpipe and thermoelectric module

Parametric study of an active and passive solar distillation system: Energy and exergy analysis

Effect of condensing cover material on yield of an active solar still: an experimental validation

In this paper, thermal models of all types of solar collector-integrated active solar stills are developed based on basic energy balance equations in terms of inner and outer glass temperatures. In this paper, hourly yield, hourly exergy efficiency, and hourly overall thermal efficiency of active solar stills are evaluated for 0.05 m water depth. All numerical computations had been performed for a typical day in the month of 07 December 2005 for the climatic conditions of New Delhi (28°35′N, 77°12′E, 216 m above MSL). The thermal model of flat-plate collector integrated with active solar still was validated using the experimental test set-up results. Total daily yield from active solar still integrated with evacuated tube collector with heat pipe is 4.24 kg m−2 day−1, maximum among all other types of active solar stills. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Comparative thermal performance evaluation of an active solar distillation system

This paper presents an exergetic analysis for passive and active solar distillation systems. The analysis is based on mass, energy and exergy balance equations, which has not been attempted in the past for active solar stills. In the present paper, it has been tried to compare the hourly exergy and thermal efficiency of passive and active solar stills. The values of hourly exergy and thermal efficiency of passive solar still are 0.1?0.8% and 2?17% while those for active solar still are in the range 0.1?1.1% and 3 15%, respectively. In case of active solar still, the effect of water depth and number of collectors on overall exergy and thermal efficiency have been obtained.

Vimal Dimri

Papers

Parametric study of an active and passive solar distillation system: Energy and exergy analysis

Effect of condensing cover material on yield of an active solar still: an experimental validation

Comparative thermal performance evaluation of an active solar distillation system

Exergetic analysis of passive and active solar stills