Abstract
This comprehensive literature review provides a rich overview of the most recent progress related to the utilization of the nanofluid in various types of the solar stills. This review considers a wide range of theoretical, experimental and numerical research papers related with the nanofluid utilization in the single slope, double slope, solar still integrated with a condenser, hybrid and other limited types of the solar stills. To make the paper more useful to the readers in its subject, the authors give also a panoramic view about the water distillation process, distillation techniques and present a detailed survey about the most published review papers up to date in the distillation techniques and the solar stills. A fruitful summary and discussion of most important conclusions which are deduced from the previous works are presented in tables (Tables 1-6) to provide the interested researchers with a good road map about the capability of the nanofluid in enhancing the performance of different types of the solar stills and guides them to start new lines of the research in this subject. It was found that the water nanoparticle mixture tends to increase the solar still productivity. From the other hand, more investigations on effect of utilizing the nanotechnology in solar still are required.