Solar drying of sweet pepper and garlic using the tunnel greenhouse drier

A new low cost design for a forced convection greenhouse drier, the Tunnel Greenhouse Drier, has been built and tested. Its main parts are: a plastic greenhouse cover containing a drying tunnel made with transparent plastic walls; a line of carts with several stacked trays containing the product and moved manually inside the tunnel and an electrical fan that moves the hot air from the greenhouse into the tunnel. The trays receive solar radiation through the transparent walls, increasing the product temperature. Heat losses from the tunnel are low since greenhouse temperatures are higher than ambient temperature. The main advantages of this drier are: (a) an almost continuous production since some carts with dried product come out of the tunnel every day, while the same amount of fresh product is introduced by the other tunnel extreme; (b) lower labor cost since the product handling is partly mechanized; (c) a conventional heater can be easily installed to keep a constant production rate; (d) the energy consumption is lower than in other drier types; (e) the installation can be used as a greenhouse for small production when it is not used as a drier. The prototype was built in the North of Argentina, and red sweet pepper and garlic were used as load. The drier thermal efficiency, considered as a solar collector, was calculated using the measured experimental data, and a linear relation between the drier temperature and the solar radiation was obtained. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.