Investigation of water depth effect on distillate production

In this investigation an effort has been made to find the effect of water depth on distillate production and to establish thermodynamic relations among the operating parameters to study their effects on still performance. In this work water is heated in a water bath and the top cover is replaced with a glass to act as condensing surface. Water is fed into water bath, the gap between water surfaces and condensing surfaces is reduced gradually. The water temperature is varied from 40-70°C at different water level during the experiment. The amount of distillate production and temperature variation was measured at an interval of 15 minutes. Based on the experimental observation, it is found that a very close agreement between theoretical and experimental results is found. The Nusselt and Grashof numbers are calculated for various experimental conditions and values of constants (C and n) are obtained from regression analysis for individual depth of water.