In this paper, natural convection heat transfer and fluid flow within a single slope solar still (SSSS) are investigated numerically. To enhance the productivity and performance of this system, the differences of bladed and non-bladed solar stills in terms of vortices resulted from natural convection heat transfer are presented. It is assumed that the flow within the still is two-dimensional, steady and laminar. The numerical method is based on SIMPLEC algorithm and is used for discretization and solving continuity, momentum, energy and concentration conservation equations. The blades are installed on the non-insulated walls of solar stills in two different ways; downward and upward. Results are posed for different blade locations, Rayleigh and Nusselt numbers. Moreover, results depict that exploiting a blade can augment system’s performance substantially in comparison with more than one. Comparison of the present numerical approach and well-known published empirical correlations proves the acceptable accuracy of this study.

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