PERFORMANCE & ANALYSIS AND OPTIMIZATION OF STEPPED TYPE SOLAR STILL

As water shortage is becoming a major problem of national as well as international concern, desalination will increasingly be required to meet growing demands of fresh water. Desalination technologies have developed rapidly during the past several decades for desalting a variety of raw waters such as seawater, brackish ground water, industrial waste water etc.The present study aims to improve the solar still performance and to increase its distillate yield. So it is necessary to evaluate some important parameters affecting the system productivity. The effect of depth of water, glass cover thickness, Different depths of saline water over the basin (5 mm, 7.5 mm and 10 mm); different thicknesses of the glass cover (3.5 mm and 4 mm); are tested under the same climatic conditions. The study aims to introduce the applicability of a stepped type solar still to determine the various parameters that influence the performance of stepped type solar still. To vary the depth of water in the basin of stepped type solar still. To vary glass cover thickness of stepped type solar still. Presentation of the optimized results obtained after detailed analysis of the data generated for various configurations of solar stills.