Desalination Using Waste Heat Recovery with Active Solar Still

Water plays a vital role in human life. The human body consists of 70–80% water in which body, bones, cells, and blood contain 22%, 95%, and 75% water, respectively. Water and energy are imperative entities for flourishing life and civilization. Population growth, rapid industrialization, and fast-growing agriculture sector lead to ineffective use of water and pollution of very less available water resources. Most of the states in India depend upon the groundwater, hence facing the problem of excessive salinity, fluoride content, and heavy amount of nitrate. As per the WHO guidelines, most of the state’s drinking water is un-potable. As per the Government of India census report, nearly 75.1% household still use solid fuel for biomass cookstove. Desalination of this polluted water using renewable energy is the only option to make this water potable. At a big scale, there is a major expense in desalination. The solar energy integrated with the waste heat of pellet-based cookstove will be able to run the desalination system during off shine hours. This hybrid system will be able to enhance the productivity of the solar still. In the present work, simulation has been carried out to find the optimum water jacket thickness and mass flow rate of water to recover the waste heat from cookstove. The heat loss from the outer surface of the cookstove has also been calculated analytically.