Performance assessment of solar still with insert of corrugated absorber plate and steel balls optimized by Taguchi method

Single-slope solar still (SS) is an attractive method for providing drinking water in certain rural areas. This work evaluated adding stainless steel balls to enhance the productivity of a single-slope solar still having a triangular-corrugated absorber plate. The variation in three operational parameters: stainless steel ball diameter (D B ), water head (H W ) and distance between balls (D b ) is considered. Taguchi analysis is utilized to evaluate the effect of each parameter for effective design of experiments. Accordingly, stainless steel balls of variant diameters (D B = 5, 7, and 10 mm) on a corrugated absorber plate were used, with both the head of water and the distance between balls fixed at 20 mm. A maximum water distillation productivity of 6017 mL/m 2 /day was obtained using 7 mm diameter stainless steel balls, resulting in a 47.37% productivity enhancement compared with the conventional design. While water productivity using solid balls with diameters of 5 and 10 mm, and in the absence of balls, was (5332, 4937 and 3845 mL/m 2 / day), respectively. Stainless steel balls immersion in the solar still added thermal mass to the system, which improved stability and increased efficiency. The new system achieved a 55.1% improvement in efficiency compared to Conventional Solar Stills (CSS). Therefore, using single-slope solar stills with a corrugated basin, enhanced by a 7 mm stainless steel ball for affordable energy storage, seems to be a very effective option.