Design and Fabrication of Water Purification System using Solar Energy

The purpose of the project is to design a water distillation system that can purify water from nearly any source, a system that is relatively cheap, portable, and depends only on renewable solar energy. The motivation for this project is the limited availability of clean water resources and the abundance of impure water available for potential conversion into potable water, in addition, there are many coastal locations where sea water is abundant but potable water is not available. Our project goal is to efficiently produce clean drinkable water from solar energy conversion. Distillation is one of many processes that can be used for water purification. This requires an energy input heat, electricity and solar radiation can be the source of energy. When solar energy is used for this purpose, it is known as solar water distillation. Solar distillation is an attractive process to produce portable water using free of cost solar energy. This energy is used directly for evaporating water inside a device usually termed as Solar Still. Solar stills are used to desalinate seawater, in desert survival kits and for home water purification. For people concerned about the quality of their municipally-supplied drinking water and unhappy with other methods of additional purification available to them solar distillation is an attractive alternative because of its simple technology, non-requirement of highly skilled labour for maintenance work and low energy consumption. The use of thermal energy in seawater desalination applications has so far been restricted to small scale system in rural areas. The reason for this has main it been explained by the relatively low productivity tare compared to the high capital cost. However, the coming shortage in fossil fuel supply and the growing need for freshwater in order to support increasing water in order to support increasing water and irrigation needs, have motivated further development of water desalination and purification by renewable energies.