Design and Fabrication of Solar Water Distillation System for Developing Countries

Abstract

The local population in Somalia is experiencing a shortage of fresh drinking water due to high salt content in the ground water. The humanitarian organization Yme is a big contributor for providing clean and safe drinking water for local communities. Yme is interested in building an effective water distillation system to improve the water quality and better the health situation in the country. The main goal of this thesis was to contribute to improving water quality by building a solar water distillation system. As the system is meant for local communities in Somalia, the technology should be easy and without modern control system. The project was highly limited by time. The parts for the prototype was therefore ordered from stock and not custom made for the project. It was also limited by location. Fabrication and testing were conducted in Norway, and not Somali conditions. To design the prototype an optimization was performed in Matlab to find optimal system temperatures. A pinch analysis was performed based on the temperatures, and the size of key components were calculated. Prior to fabrication, a 3D model of the system was made in Solidworks in order to design the system. Due to low temperatures during testing, the prototype was not able to evaporate the saline water. The main reason for the system’s inability to distillate water was the external conditions in the testing environment. Calculations indicates that the system should be able to evaporate the water in Somali conditions. For future work, the system should be insulated and tested under various conditions to find the external conditions requirements for the distillation to take place