Performance evaluation of solar dryer with sensible heat storage for agricultural products

Abstract

In most of the developing countries, the food problem arises due newlineto the lack of adequate cold storage or preservation facilities rather than low newlineproduction. The most viable option for encountering the worldand#8223;s food newlineproblem is to reduce the losses occurring due to the reasons of improper newlinecultivation and fertilization, lack of suitable technology, lack of marketing newlinechannels, high post-harvest losses, lack of suitable storage and handling newlinefacilities etc. The preservation of agricultural products is the best solution to newlinereduce spoilage of the products during the storage periods. Many newlinepreservation technologies like drying, freezing, salting, canning, vacuum newlinepackaging, etc., have been employed over the years but still drying is newlinefollowed for economic reasons. The drying process is an energy-intensive newlineprocess; especially in industries, the drying process consumes 10-25 % of newlinetotal energy consumption in well-developed countries.Solar food processing is the efficient and economical solution for addressing different food problems in the postharvest stage and also to the newlineworldand#8223;s energy requirements. Solar dryer seems to be a very useful device in newlinethe point of view of energy conservation and environmental pollution. It newlinesaves quite an amount of energy or fossil fuel and also advantageous in the newlineaspects of quality of dried products, space requirement, and capital cost. The objectives of this present investigation are (i) To develop an indirect forced convection solar dryer integrated with packed bed sensible heat storage medium for drying agricultural products. (ii) To study the effect of packed bed sensible thermal storage medium on the indirect solar dryer for newlinedrying agricultural products. (iii) To develop a mathematical model for the newlinesolar collector with sensible thermal storage to predict the thermal newline newline