review · International Journal of Ambient Energy
Solar distillation provides an economical and straightforward approach to producing freshwater, yet conventional devices often suffer from low output rates. Integrating wick materials into solar stills represents a significant modification designed to accelerate evaporation rates and enhance daily yields. A comprehensive review examines the influence of various wick types and configurations across both conventional and non-conventional solar still designs. The findings demonstrate that adding suitable wick materials can substantially boost freshwater production, achieving productivity increases of up to 180 percent in certain configurations. Synthesised insights from diverse setups offer practical guidance on how material choices and geometric arrangements affect distillation performance. This consolidated evidence establishes clear benchmarks and performance trends to inform future research and engineering developments in wick-type solar still technologies.
Access to clean drinking water remains a critical challenge, especially where simple, low-cost technologies are required. Solar distillation offers an affordable solution, but low yields limit its adoption. Demonstrating that basic modifications such as wick materials can more than double freshwater production provides a viable path to making solar water purification practical and effective for communities in need.
The work informs the design of solar-powered water purification hardware for off-grid or resource-limited settings. Equipment manufacturers and technology developers could adopt wick-based enhancements to improve freshwater production rates in low-cost stills. Because the source material is a review of research literature rather than a tested product, the underlying technology remains at an applied research stage requiring field validation and manufacturing standardisation before practical deployment.
AI-generated from the published abstract. Always read the original work before citing.
Solar distillation techniques are of high significance to provide human needs of freshwater. Even though these techniques are simple and economic, their output distillate production is low. One of the modern significant modifications performed to enlarge the rate of evaporation inside the solar stills is using the wick materials with various types and different arrangements, hence the freshwater yield could be improved. To obtain the significance of the wicks, in some cases, the productivity of a solar still was enlarged by 180% with providing a wick material as will be discussed later in this review. As a result, in this manuscript, a generalised survey of the effects of using different wicks on the performance of not only the conventional still but also of all types of solar stills is presented. Besides, satisfying conclusions are summarised to help the researchers intending to work on the wick type solar still.
This page summarises published work. The authoritative version sits with the publisher.
DOI: 10.1080/01430750.2018.1563808
Is something wrong with this record? Report it or request removal.
Discussion
Have you built on this work, tried to replicate it, or seen it applied in practice? Share what you know. Verified researchers and MARATTO™ domain experts can open a discussion, and any member can reply. Contributions are reviewed before they appear.
No discussion yet. Open the first thread.
New to MARATTO™? Create a free account.
