Seasonal effect on solar distillation in the El-Oued region of south-east Algeria

Abstract

In the present purely experimental work, we tested a solar distiller with a simple slope in the region of El-Oued located in the south-east of Algeria, during the winter then the summer seasons at the same place. Dimensions of the studied device are 1000 x 500 mm, while the depth of the water to be distilled is 1 cm, the glazing thickness is 4 mm, and the tilt angle with respect to the horizontal is 10 °.The aim of this work is to compare distillation between winter (January) and summer (May) to show that weather factors such as solar radiation, ambient temperature and humidity are influential on the distiller productivity. The amount of distilled water in winter was about 119 ml per day. However, that in summer was 1127 ml per day in total, so it is an increase of more than 9 times the production of distilled water.