PERFORMANCE CHARACTERIZATION OF A MULTI-STAGE SOLAR STILL - Energy Research Developments: Tidal Energy, Energy Efficiency and Solar Energy - page 131

Chapter 5

P ERFORMANCE C HARACTERIZATION
OF A M ULTI -S TAGE S OLAR S TILL

S. Ben Jabrallah 1,2 ∗ , B. Dhifaoui 2 ,
A. Belghith 2,3 and J.P. Corriou 4
1 Faculté des Sciences de Bizerte, Zarzouna, Bizerte, Tunisie
2 Laboratoire d'Energétique et des Transferts Thermique et Massique de Tunis
3 Faculté des Sciences de Tunis. Campus universitaire. Tunis, Tunisie
4 Laboratoire des Sciences de Génie Chimique, CNRS-ENSIC, Nancy Cedex, France

Abstract

The present paper concerns the experimental study of heat and mass transfer in a distillation
cell. The cell is a parallelepiped cavity, of high form factor and with vertical active walls. Pure
water is evaporated from a film of salted water which falls along a heated wall while the
opposite wall is maintained at a relatively low temperature and is used as a condensation wall.
The experimental results show that that the mass transfer inside the distillation cell is
dominated by the latent heat transfer associated to evaporation. These results allowed us to
perform a parametric study of the operating parameters of the distillation cell. A convenient
choice of these parameters is necessary to optimize the distillation yield. The performance of a
three-stage distiller derived from the characteristics of a single-stage distiller has been studied.
Keywords : Heat and mass transfer, evaporation, condensation, thin film, energy,
desalination, multi-stage distiller.

Nomenclature

b distance between the two active walls (m)

C p heat capacity (J/kg/K)

H form factor of the cavity

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