Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
International Conference on Advances in Science and Arts Istanbul 2017, İstanbul, Türkiye, 29 Mart 2017, ss.1
At the present time, over a billion people lack access
to clean drinking water. With the worldwide industrialization and global
warming, even the sources we have today are at a risk of contamination in the
future. In this respect, membrane distillation (MD) is a viable solution to
obtain potable water. It is, however, criticized because of its higher energy
demand. In this work, we focus on this problem and offer a portable membrane distillation
unit that is connected to a parabolic solar collector which provides the needed
energy for heating of water to the desired temperature. This approach minimizes
the cost of energy consumption, as solar energy is one of the most accessible
energy forms around the world.
MD unit requires an inlet temperature in the range of
60-70 C; therefore, it is crucial to control the output temperature of water
leaving the parabolic solar collector. The atmospheric temperature, solar
irradiance, wind velocity and flow rate of water flowing through the solar
collector are the variables in this matter. To this end, we use COMSOL
Multiphysics® to characterize the proposed system. In this paper, we used this
platform to obtain simulations of heating of water flowing through 3.4 cm
inside, 4 cm outside diametered copper pipe located at the focus of a parabolic
solar collector which can increase the solar irradiance tenfold (10x solar
irradiance). By changing the variables we observed the output temperature of
water. With the data collected from the simulations, we used central–composite
design to obtain a model for the system.We also studied the energy balance of
the collector and obtained a relation for efficiency in terms of our variables,
which results in reasonable values for the system.