Design, fabrication and performance evaluation of solar dryer for banana

An indirect, active-type, environmentally friendly, low-cost solar dryer was designed to dry various agricultural products. The dryer was built by locally available, biologically degradable, low-cost materials. The dryer consists of solar flat plate air heater with three layers of insulation, drying chamber and a fan with a regulator to induce required air flow in the system. Banana is the chosen crop for the experimentation since it is high in production and also has substantial loss in India. Also, dried bananas are having good nutritive value which makes it as essential diet. The experiments were conducted to dry banana slices and to study its drying characteristics like rate of drying and quality of dried banana in terms of taste, colour and shape. The dryer has the following features: two different air flow configurations (air flow between glass cover and absorber plate called as the top flow and air flow between absorber plate and the bottom insulation of solar collector called as the bottom flow), forced flow with variable flow rates from 0–3 m/s and two different mounting schemes (conventional trays and wooden skewers). In the top and bottom flow experiments, the bottom flow provided about 2.5 °C higher chamber temperatures than the top flow for the same solar energy input. The efficiency of top flow configuration was found to be 27.5 %, whereas the efficiency of bottom flow configuration was found to be higher at 38.21 %. The results also agree well with the theoretical calculations performed as 60 W of energy can be saved for the same energy input. The drying rate was found to increase when wooden skewers were used instead of conventional trays. At the end of the day, the total difference in moisture content is found to be 3.1 % which is considerable knowing that the rate of drying drastically decreases with time. Banana dried at 1 m/s air flow rate was of the best quality in terms of colour, taste and shape when compared to drying at 0.5 and 2 m/s air flow rate while the weather condition and ambient conditions were almost the same for all the cases with negligible difference.