PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT OF SOLAR DRYER
Keywords:
Relative humidity control, Solar dryer, EfficiencyAbstract
Drying is a process of reducing moisture content of a product to extend shelf life and increase product value. It is generally known that energy consumption of drying is rather high; therefore, a development of dryer using renewable energy as a heating source is necessary. For this reason, the performance enhancement of solar dryer using ventilation fan control was studied in this research. The criterion used for turning on-off the ventilation fan was the difference between relative humidity of the air at the inlet and outlet of the drying chamber. The four models of solar dryers were constructed by using four different drying techniques to assess the performance of the passive solar dryer (PSD) and solar dryers equipped with relative humidity difference control of 5% (SD-RH5), 10% (SD-RH10) and 15% (SD-RH15), respectively. Pork with the initial moisture content of 265±2% dry basis was selected as the sampling material. The criteria used to evaluate the solar dryer performance are drying rate, solar dryer efficiency and specific energy consumption. The experimental results showed that the performance of solar dryer could be improved by using ventilation fan control technique. Also, the SD-RH10 performance was higher than that of SD-RH5, SD-RH15 and PSD. In addition, the drying rate of SD-RH10 was higher than that for SD-RH5, SD-RH15 and PSD by approximately 1.93%, 3.38% and 3.38%, respectively. Moreover, the specific energy consumption of SD-RH10 was lower than that for SD-RH5, SD-RH15 and PSD by around 7.54%, 2.16% and 1.86%, respectively. Finally, solar dryer efficiencies of PSD, SD-RH5, SD-RH10 and SD-RH15 were about 8.47%, 8.11%, 8.68% and 8.46%, respectively.
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