Experimental study on the single basin solar still integrated with shell and spiral finned tube latent heat storage system enhanced by copper oxide nanoparticles

In this work, a latent heat storage system was designed, installed, and tested when it was integrated with a single basin solar still. The latent heat storage system is a shell and spiral finned tubes, where 20 kg of a paraffin-CuO nanocomposite with a weight fraction concentration of 1% was poured into the shell while hot water from the solar collector was being pumped through the spiral finned tubes. In order to identify the effect of implementing the storage system on the performance of the solar still, two experiments were conducted, with and without storage, under approximatelysimilar weather conditions. The proposed design of the storage system succeeded to overcome all challenges associated with using paraffin wax as storage material with the solar still. The obtained results revealed that an improvement in fresh water daily productivity of 4.54% was achieved when the storage system was integrated with the solar still. The economic analysis showed that the cost per 1 L of fresh water was 0.25 $/L when the storage unit was used. This high cost will be significantly reduced when a large-scale system is installed.