A comprehensive review of inclined solar stills: Performance enhancements through design modifications, system integration, and advanced materials

The current review stands out as a an original contribution to the field of sustainable desalination methods, as it is the first to methodically classify and emphasis on the inventions within the Inclined Solar Stills (ISS). Unlike forgoing reviews on solar stills that delivered a general indication, this review explores particular innovations that improve this unique configuration, underlining its upgraded aspects in a dedicated manner. The motivation behind this review is the pressing request for efficient and sustainable desalination technologies, demonstrating a focused exploration of ISS as a potential, environmentally friendly solution. Contrasting traditional solar still methods of low productivity, the ISS designs set notable advancements that improve freshwater productivity. The methodology of this review classifies and analyses the recent research developments systematically into four main categories: (1) the design modifications and structural optimisation, including the addition of baffles, stepped basins, weirs, and reflectors; (2) the integration with external systems and active components, including photovoltaic (PV) panels, flat plate collectors, and phase change materials (PCMs); (3) the use of advanced materials and nanotechnology, such as nano-enhanced wicks and nanocomposites; and (4) the performance modeling, analysis and optimisation using the computational. The review reports that there are substantial performance gains, with particular advances to freshwater productivity being found in design optimisations such as baffles and reflectors that introduce improved freshwater productivity by 57.2%. Also, the active integrations with PV and collectors introduce a freshwater productivity of 7.9 kg/day, besides an improvement of thermal efficiency by 51.85% due to using advanced materials such as Fe 2 O 3 nanoparticle-functionalized wicks. In a summary, the conclusions of this review present evidence that ISS with design solutions, system integrations, and material science are a very viable choice and a much better path than enhanced path to sustainable freshwater production with the promise of producing extremely high daily freshwater productivity of more than 11.58 kg/m 2 and reducing the freshwater production cost as low as 0.0088/kg; thus are indispensable in the face of water security in arid and remote regions. Inclined solar still: A path to high efficiency, low cost desalination.