Investigating the Effect of Water Temperature and Inclination Angle on the Performance of Single Slope Solar Still: A Taguchi Approach

The present work focuses on the application of Taguchi technique to investigate the effect of temperature and inclination angle on the performance of the single slope solar stills inclined at 15 O , 30 O and 45 O . An indoor simulation model was developed using constant temperature water bath to maintain water temperatures at steady state for the purpose of experiment. The condensing covers inclined at 15 O , 30 O and 45 O were fabricated of commonly used glass sheet to form top inclined cover and GRP sheets to make the side walls of the cover. Orthogonal arrays of taguchi, the Signal–to-Noise (S/N) ratio, the analysis of variance (ANOVA), and regression analysis have been employed to analyze the effect of the factors on the response. Linear regression equation has been developed with an objective to establish a correlation between the selected parameters and the Productivity. The predicted values have been compared with experimental data and are found to be in good agreement. Temperature is found to be the most significant factor contributing towards the productivity.