Solar Biomass Hybrid Dryer

Abstract

Poor drying and processing techniques used by the farmers have led to loss of quantity and quality of agricultural crops. Drying is one of the technique for protection of fruits and vegetable but also an energy consuming process. Solar energy is one of the pillars for environment friendly energy. The downside of the solar energy is the interruption during the night and cloudy and wet weather. To counteract this and provide continuous operation an improved version of Solar Biomass Hybrid Dryer is developed. This project presents the design, construction, analysis and performance of a mixed-mode solar dryer for food preservation. The drying chamber receives hot air from two sources. One source is the solar collector and the other source is the Biomass heat exchanger. The system can be modified to cater different fruits and vegetables that require drying temperature in the range of 40 to 60 ⁰C by varying the flowrate of the inlet atmospheric air in solar collector and heat exchanger. The main goal is to develop an efficient and cost effective dryer manufactured from locally available raw materials. The main components of the dryer are flat plate solar collector, heat exchanger, drying chamber and fans. To achieve maximum efficiency a new design of heat exchanger and drying chamber is developed. Analysis on ANSYS CFD and COMSOL is carried out to further verify the numerical results from solving equations on MTALAB. It is observed that the use of this type of dryer reduce the dehydrating time significantly and provides better product quality compared with orthodox drying method.