Exergo-enviro-economic analyses and productivity evaluation of conical solar still integrated with evacuated collectors for sustainable solar distillation
Abhishek Kumar, Rajesh Kumar
Abstract
Utilizing solar energy for freshwater production offers a sustainable solution to freshwater crisis, aligning with United Nation’s sustainable development goals. While recent research has explored conical solar still, there is an untapped potential in active conical solar distillers. Also, the conical solar still has less shading effect as compared to other solar stills which motivated us to work on it. The proposed work focuses on exergo-enviro-economic, productivity, freshwater cost and payback period analyses for conical solar still combined with N number of evacuated tubular collectors (NETC-CSS) under optimized condition. Fundamental equations derived using thermodynamic principle is implemented in MATLAB with supporting data. For N = 0, results of NETC-CSS are validated against existing experimental data. The analysis is done for the whole year of New Delhi, encompassing all four weather conditions in each month. Concludingly, exergy output per unit ₹, annual productivity, freshwater cost and the payback period are obtained as 0.841 kWh/₹, 630.80 %, ₹ 0.79 per kg and 4.03 year respectively at a 2 % interest rate and 30-years life span. The enviro-economic parameter is higher by 84.30 % and freshwater cost is lower by 81.10 % for NETC-CSS when compared with modified water-cooled solar still and dish integrated solar still respectively.