Experimental study of the role of surface tension in enhancing the performance of solar stills using different designs of plastic fins

The study underscores the significance of ongoing research and innovation in developing sustainable water purification technologies to address the escalating global water crisis. Whereas, solar distillers are considered the most important simple and inexpensive solutions to produce water for remote areas that suffer from the problem of lack of clean water, but are flawed by its low productivity. Therefore, this study aims to devise a simple, inexpensive, and effective solution to increase the evaporation rates within conventional solar stills to improve their productivity. To achieve this, the surface tension represents one of most important factors that affect the evaporation rates. So this study dealt with the proposal to install plastic fins in the basin of solar stills, provided that its height is greater than the thickness of the basin water layer, these plastic fins are mainly aimed at increasing the surface tension, this will help spread the water on the surface of plastic fins and thus helps to increase evaporation rates. To get the optimal diameter of plastic fins that achieve the highest improvement rates, three modified solar stills with plastic fins were designed which have the same number of plastic fins with different diameters of 0.5 cm (MSS1), 1 cm (MSS2), and 1.5 cm (MSS3), and they were compared to the reference solar still (RSS). The results showed that the use of plastic fins with a diameter of 0.5 cm (MSS1) represents the optimal design that achieves the highest performance which produced 6176 ml/m² day, compared to 4368 ml/m² day that produced by RSS. This suggests that the plastic fins with 0.5 cm diameter play a crucial role in the performance of the solar stills, which improve their productivity by a rate reached 41.4%. The findings highlight the potential for optimizing solar still performance through the design and integration of plastic fin tubes, offering promising advancements in water purification technologies.