A detailed review of the factors impacting pyramid type solar still performance

Solar stills are commonly employed in solar desalination. On the other hand, solar still has low productivity. Many research projects are being carried out to improve the productivity of solar stills. This paper provides an overview of the detailed parameters affecting the performance of pyramid solar stills. These parameters are meteorological, design, and operating factors. The mete-orological factors are solar irradiation, relative humidity, air speed, ambient temperature, and dust and cloud weather. In other respects, the operating parameters include the coloring of water, water flow, surfactant additives, salinity and contaminant levels, system maintenance water feeding, posi-tion of the solar still, and other effects. While the design Included are the number of basins and slopes, shapes of solar stills, inclination of the cover, thermal energy storage, basin absorption rates, reflectors and mirrors, sun tracking system, insulation thickness, additive materials, and water depth in the basin. From this perspective, in this review, we are attempting to research the current situation of various designs of pyramid solar stills. Based on many studies, the productivity of pyra-mid stills can be increased up to 35% with the use of PCM and up to 88% when using both v -corrugated absorber plates and PCM due to their increased heat storage capabilities. However, both reflectors and mirrors increase distillate productivity up to 48% and 53%, respectively. Further-more, due to increased absorption of solar radiation, some types of nanoparticles increased solar productivity yield by up to 72%. Using this body of literature and other studies, it is concluded that climatic, design, and operating factors significantly influence the performance of the pyramid dis-tiller. Furthermore, further work recommendations are proposed.(c) 2022 THE AUTHORS. Published by Elsevier BV on behalf of Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

Solar stills are commonly used for solar desalination but have low productivity. This paper provides an overview of the parameters affecting the performance of pyramid solar stills, including meteorological, design, and operating factors. Various factors such as solar irradiation, water coloring, and reflectors significantly affect the productivity of solar stills. Studies have shown that the use of PCM, v-corrugated absorber plates, and nanoparticles can greatly increase the productivity of pyramid stills. However, further research and improvements are still needed to optimize the performance of solar stills.