Impact of Solar Energy and Energy Storage on a Still’s Nocturnal Output

TLDR: In this paper , the thermal behavior of a simple greenhouse solar still is coupled with a sensible heat storage tank to ensure the heating of the brine by energy stored and therefore to improve the performance of the solar still by the night production of distilled water.

Abstract: Solar stills represent one of the effective solutions in remote regions that suffer from the problem of lack of fresh water, but the disadvantage of their type of distillation technologies is the low productivity of pure water per square meter of evaporation surface. During the night, the brine cools down because of the absence of solar radiation, which causes a discontinuity in the operation of the solar still, which no longer produces freshwater. Therefore, the current work aims to achieve the highest performance of solar stills. To achieve these, in the present work, the thermal behavior of a simple greenhouse solar still is coupled to a sensible heat storage tank to ensure the heating of the brine by energy stored and therefore to improve the performance of the solar still by the night production of distilled water. The results obtained are encouraging because the improvement rate was 27.70 % compared to the daily light sentence and the thermal efficiency of our system during the night phase was stable between 60 and 61 %.