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Modeling and simulation of a photovoltaic assisted single-slope solar still

University of British Columbia

Water is crucial and very important to our lives needs such as human needs, artificial needs and agriculture’s needs. Seawater desalination process in industrial applications plays a primarily role in meeting the demands for fresh water. The energy of desalination process can be obtained from fossil fuel or from a renewable source of energies such as solar, wind and geothermal energy. Nowadays, Solar energy can be utilized in water production by evaporating saline water in order to produce fresh water. Solar still desalination is considered as one of the emerging processes among other different methods that employs renewable source of energy. This technology has multiple advantages comprising simplicity, ease of maintenance, low cost and low environmental impact. Solar still is a renowned technology for water desalination, impurities and contaminants removal and high-quality water production. Scientists have to illustrate the applications of the solar desalination system based on energy, exergy, thermo dynamic properties and cost analysis. The design analysis should consider the technique and types of the desalination system. It is necessary to model a flexible visualized computer program in order to design/or perform a reliable analysis for a widespread range of solar desalination processes with different structures. The proposed topic claims for modeling and simulation of an integrated solar cell heating element (photovoltaic cell) system accompanied with a single slope solar still for performance improvement, process optimization and efficiency enhancement. The main objective of this study is to develop a software using SIMULINK in order to design and simulate solar desalination systems single slope solar still with a photovoltaic Cell. The study results reveal that solar desalination technique without a photovoltaic cell is astonishing with lower efficiency and performance, while comparing with solar desalination technique assisted with a photovoltaic cell (heating coil) that improve the efficiency by 45% and enhance the performance of the entire system.

Text

2020-12-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/76886

Chemical and Biological Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/