Atmospheric Water Harvesting from Low-Humid Regions of Hail City in Saudi Arabia
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Original Paper
Atmospheric Water Harvesting from Low-Humid Regions of Hail City in Saudi Arabia Mohamed Elashmawy1,2,3 and Ibrahim Alatawi1 Received 19 January 2020; accepted 18 March 2020
Atmospheric water harvesting (AWH) is emerging as a promising technique of water production in remote and isolated areas away from natural water resources. The present study describes potential of the AWH from low-humid regions under the climatic conditions of Hail city (27.64° N, 41.75° E) in Saudi Arabia. Trapezoidal prism solar still of 5-shelves is developed, where the shelves are filled with black cotton cloth bed saturated with calcium chloride solution. The solar still is opened during night hours, enabling the descant to absorb humidity from humid air (absorption process) and closed during day hours causing desorption of water under higher temperatures (regeneration process). The vapor condensates on a glass surface and is collected in a bottle. Under low-humid conditions of the Hail city, the desiccant balanced approximately at 48% saturation concentration. The water production of the device reaches 1.06 l/m2day by consuming 22.96 MJ solar energy/l of water with a cost of $0.055 per liter. The present study has demonstrated high potential of the AWH technique from low-humid regions up to 26.5%. The proposed device is standalone with promising performance, which needs neither the natural water resources nor the infrastructure. The device is suitable for remote and isolated small communities. KEY WORDS: AWH, Solar still, Calcium chloride, Desiccant, Low humidity, Multi-shelves.
INTRODUCTION Water scarcity is a big challenge worldwide. There are 3.2 billion people globally suffering from water scarcity problems because of isolated areas away from water resources (Team et al. 2014). In addition, people in Saudi Arabia are facing a lack of the natural water resources. They mainly depend on industrial water desalination from two main resources, underground and seawater. The underground water is of two types: surface wells and deep 1
Mechanical Engineering Department, Engineering College, University of Hail, Hail 2440, Saudi Arabia. 2 Mechanical Engineering Department, Engineering College, Suez University, Suez 43521, Egypt. 3 To whom correspondence should be addressed; e-mail: [email protected]
wells. The surface wells are renewable and are refilled with rains continuously, while the deep wells in Saudi Arabia were formed through thousand years through the leakage of surface ground wells for a long time. Indeed, deep wells are considered as the most underground water resources. With the increase in water demand in Saudi Arabia, the deep wells will degrade and need further thousand years to be refilled. In most cases, underground water is not drinkable and needs to be treated. In such cases, the reverse osmosis (RO) is one of the preferred techniques for water desalination due to low water salinity. Seawater desalination plants in Saudi Arabia are distributed along two coasts of the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf. Multista
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