Performance Comparisons of Solar Desalination Devices and Processes

Numerical analysis of two passive solar desalination designs, the traditional pool evaporation design and the proposed tray design are performed. The significance of common assumption for the pool evaporation design that neglect the mass balance and psychrometric relationships for the air-water vapor volume were investigated and found that neglecting this component results in over predicting the freshwater production by 32.6% and 19.5% for the summer and winter design day, respectively. It was also found that the tray design produced 31.3 % and 7% more freshwater per summer and winter design day, respectively. These results support the need to include all physical components in the numerical simulation. The results also support the tray design as producing significantly more freshwater for the same input.Copyright © 2012 by ASME