Abstract:
This paper discuss on design, development and fabrication of a solar thermal driven
desalination unit to produce fresh water by using saline/ brackish water. At present, only
1% is available for the needs of all plants, animal and human life as fresh water in the
world. Shortage of fresh water is becoming a severe threat that is continuously rising in Sri
Lanka and highly affected not only in coastal areas, but in the other areas as well. Due to
the lack of pure fresh water, a large number of fluorosis has been identified in the area of
North Eastern and South Eastern provinces, which lying on dry zone. Skeleton fluorosis
and Mild dental fluorosis is major problem and kidney failures also have been increased
due to usage of blackish water. As a solution to overcome this scarcity of pure fresh water,
the desalination process can be used and the level of applicability need to be more explored
based on Sri Lankan climate and socio-economic conditions. Therefore, the authors suggest
a solution for this problem, which can be obtained from the nature itself. That is solar
desalination which used solar energy for the water desalination process. Here, the authors
developed a system to produce desalinated water from saline/ brackish water using solar
energy as a sustainable solution. The process initially produces steam at a flash chamber
and the collected steam is condensed to fresh water at the desalination unit. Three parabolic
trough collectors were used as the solar collector and each collector has an aperture area of
2 m2
. At the testing stage, an average of 50 ml of distilled water was collected during 1 hour
and 55min.
