Optimized construction of marble pieces as a thermal storage materials for performance improvement of hemispherical solar distiller

Abstract The present work aims to obtain the optimized construction of marble pieces that achieves the highest hemispherical solar distiller’s performance. To achieve this idea, four different marble pieces (black marble pieces, green marble pieces, red marble pieces, and white marble pieces) were tested to obtain the optimal construction of the marble that achieves the highest hemispherical solar distiller performance. The marble pieces were placed on a basin of hemispherical distillers which represent absorber materials, as well as the sensible thermal storage materials. This was done by design and constructed three hemispherical distillers, first represent the classical hemispherical distiller (CHD) which represent the reference case, but the marble pieces were placed inside the basin of the second and third distiller. The experimentation tested were conducted on two cases; in the first case we tested two types of marble pieces (black and green marble pieces) by placed them in the second and third distiller (hemispherical distiller with black marble pieces (HSD-BMP) and hemispherical distiller with green marble pieces (HSD-GMP)). In the second case we tested the other two types of marble pieces (red and white marble pieces) by placed them in the second and third distiller (hemispherical distiller with red marble pieces (HSD-RMP) and hemispherical distiller with white marble pieces (HSD-WMP)). The results showed that utilization of red marble pieces (HSD-RMP) represents a good choice which improved the accumulative productivity to 7.75 l/m2 day compared to 4.8 l/m2day that achieved by the CHD with an improvement of 61.46%. The accumulative thermal efficiency of CHD reached 39.25%, while the utilization of red marble pieces (HSD-RMP) improved the accumulative thermal efficiency to 62.98%. Also, the use of red marble pieces reduced the distillate cost by 35.6% compared to the reference distiller.