Hemispherical solar distiller with truncated circular cone-shaped reflector mirrors (TCC-RM): optimum inclination of reflector mirrors

Abstract

The present study aims to achieve the highest cumulative yield of the hemispherical distillers, by designing and constructing new reflector mirrors, which are truncated circular cone-shaped reflector mirrors (TCC-RM). To obtain the optimum inclination of TCC-RM that achieves a highest hemispherical distiller's performance, eight inclination angles ( 10o , 15 o , 20 o , 25 o , 30 o , 35 o , 40 o and 45 o with vertical) was experimentally studied. To achieve this, a series of experimental tests were carried out on the three hemispherical solar distillers, the first represents the reference distiller (traditional hemispherical solar distiller-THSD) and the other two devices are the hemispherical solar distiller with truncated circular cone-shaped reflector mirrors (HSD-TCCRM) with different inclination angles. The experimental results indicate that utilizing TCC-RM with a 25 o inclination angle achieves the maximum cumulative yield of 8.35 L/m 2 with an improvement of 42.74% compared to THSD. While the utilization of TCC-RM with the inclination angles by 30 o , 35 o , 20 o , 40 o , and 15 o achieves the cumulative yield of 7.