Thermal Distillation Using Heat Localization

Thermal desalination using solar energy is one of the most propitious application in renewable energies and a viable solution for treating the waste water to meet the present-day water standards. This work demonstrates the re-using of waste water by using the laboratory designed low-cost desalination system under 1 sun solar concentration condition, a double layer structure comprising carbon foam and exfoliated graphite are used for solar thermal conversion, Where heat is localized to top layer get heated and evaporated due to the capillary action of the porous structure at the top, vapor is allowed to condense and fresh water is collected. This is eco-friendly and low cost due to solar energy and grid-free operations and great option for the semi- arid and drought prone regions

A combined experimental/numerical approach to study the thermal dispersion in porous media flows

The non-isothermal transport during flow in porous media is studied for single- and dualscale porous media. A new combined experimental/numerical approach to estimating the thermal dispersion tensor is introduced and applied for both isotropic (single-scale) and anisotropic (dualscale) porous media. The equivalence between the heat and mass transfer is exploited and a 1-D flow experimental setup is employed to study the spreading of a dye. Later, the mathematical model for such a spreading of concentration (equivalent to the temperature) around a point input in a constant velocity field is solved using the finite element based code COMSOL. Thus obtained numerical spreading pattern is fitted onto the experimentally observed one using the dispersion matrix (tensor) as a fitting parameter. A few cases of single- and dual-scale porous media are studied and the dispersion tensors are reported for each individual case. In one case, the results are validated with the available experimental data in the literature which shows a good match