Wind turbine-inclined still collector integration with solar still for brackish water desalination

This paper presents a new hybrid desalination system that constitutes of wind turbine (WT) and inclined solar water distillation (ISWD) integrated with main solar still (MSS). The new developed system is designed, fabricated and evaluated under actual environmental conditions. A small wind turbine is used to operate a rotating shaft fitted in the MSS to break boundary layer of the basin water surface. Also, an ISWD system which consists of an inclined flat solar absorber plate covered with black-wick medium is attached to the exit of MSS. The system can produce distilled and hot water. The heating and evaporating processes take place in MSS as well as ISWD, and then the water are condensing on the glass covers. The system was tested at different water depths (0.01, 0.02 and 0.03 m), different water flow rates (25.0, 41.7 and 58.3 ml/min) and two modes of operation as due south and tracking the sun. Variation of ambient conditions, and water temperatures and outputs were used to evaluate each parameter. It was found that, increasing water depths at the same flow rate caused a decrease in the distilled water productivity. The amount of fresh water per square meter from the ISWD could be higher than the MSS with a range of 26.55 to 29.17% when the system is due south, while it ranged from 27.1 to 32.93% when the system is tracking the sun. The average daily efficiency of MSS and ISWD ranged from 67.21 to 69.59 and 57.77 to 62.01% when the system was due south, while it ranged from 66.81 to 69.01 and 57.08 to 62.38% when the system was tracking the sun, respectively. The water product cost is found to be 0.662 and 0.552 RMB/l (1 US $ = 7.43 RMB) when the system was due south and tracking the sun, respectively. The electricity annual savings is found to be 195.22 RMB/kWh/m2. The distilled water quality as well as hot remaining water is good enough for domestic usage.