Scarcity of fresh water sources, rapid industrial development and increase of urban population in arid regions like
UAE lead to tremendous increase in bottled water dependency for drinking purpose. The bottling process right from
treatment to delivery is highly unsustainable and hence we focus on the issue of providing pure drinking water in a
sustainable way through solar domestic hot water (SDHW) systems. The shift towards sustainability in the oil rich
region and recent growth of interest on Membrane Distillation (MD) technique at small scale application
development by coupling with solar energy source has motivated us to develop a combined SDHW-MD pilot unit for
feasibility analysis. Present application is to co-generate 20 l/day of drinkable water and 250 l/day of domestic hot
water for a single family house/villa in UAE region. Experiments are performed for municipal water purification and
compared with empirical equation based model developed using laboratory experimental data along with PolySun
simulations. Monthly energy consumption and water production profiles have been obtained which would form a
basis for detailed dynamic simulation and optimization of system performance.