Experimental investigation of an indirect type natural convection solar dryer

An indirect type natural convection solar dryer is designed, constructed and investigated experimentally under Tanta prevailing weather conditions. The system consists of a flat plate solar air heater connected to a cabinet acting as a drying chamber. The air heater is designed to be able to insert various storage materials under the absorber plate in order to improve the drying process. Sand is used as the storage material. Drying experiments have been conducted with and without storage materials for different spherical fruits, such as seedless grapes, figs and apples, as well as vegetables, such as green peas, tomatoes and onions. The solar irradiance, temperature distribution in different parts of the system, ambient temperature and relative humidity of the inlet and outlet drying air have been recorded. The equilibrium moisture content Me for seedless grapes is reached after 60 and 72 h when the system is used with and without storage material, respectively. Therefore, the storage material reduces the drying process by 12 h. In order to accelerate the drying process, the drying products are divided into pieces and then chemically treated by dipping the samples into boiling water containing 0.4% olive oil and 0.3% NaOH for 60 s. However, the required time to achieve Me for the chemically treated seedless grapes, when the system is used with sand as a storage material, is drastically reduced to 8 h. Moreover, we found that the storage and chemical pretreatment have caused significant decreases of the drying time for all the investigated crops. The present system is capable of drying 10 kg of chemically treated grapes or green peas during 20 h of sunshine. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.