Solar distillation improvements

Abstract

Solar distillation is one of the solar energy applications that have been known for a long time. In fact, towards the end of the last century a desalination plant was built in Las Salinas (Chile) with a production of 20m2/day during the summer. Nevertheless it is still an important area nowadays and investigations are still going on. The problem of inadequate potable water supply for domestic use has been a burden since the very early centuries, in Malta. And although several attempts, ranging from reverse osmosis plants to the construction of a large number of reservoirs for water catchment, the problem has not been adequately solved. This does not mean that building solar distillation plants will solve the problem, but these may also be helpful, especially in summer, when due to the heat and the large number of tourists the water consumption is very high. But for the ordinary man, the use of solar energy in place of conventional fuels is still strange. This is only natural because of the low cost, availability and reliability of other energy appliances, men have experimented with various types of energy and concluded that oil was the best and cheapest as well as the easiest to obtain. Solar distillation was the subject of extensive research and development efforts in various parts of the world during the 1950s and 1960s, especially due to the oil crisis. These efforts dwindled and had almost disappeared because investigators were unable to design solar stills that would produce large quantities of water as cheaply as other types of distillation, even though the oil prices have risen fourfold since the early 1960s [...].