Design Modification and Fabrication of An Active Solar Dryer

This study presents the design modification and performance evaluation of an active solar dryer.The Modified Active Solar Dryer (MASD) is equipped with a non-concentrating flat plate thermal collector and drying chamber to dry various agricultural products.The drying chamber contains trays inside it.These are used to completely circulate airflow inside it.The drying Chamber has a cross-section Area of 0.30m × 0.45m and a height of 0.45m.The Flat plate collector has 0.91 m length, 0.45 m width, 0.12 m depth, and 0.049 𝑚 3 volume.This study performed experimental work and evaluated performance by drying the chili in a Simplified Active Solar Dryer and Modified Active Solar dryer from 8 am to5 pm with average solar irradiance of 883.25𝑊 𝑚 2 ⁄ .The temperature has been recorded at six different points.The difference in temperatures between the dryer input and the surrounding air has been observed continuously.Temperatures at the Thermal Collector and Drying Chamber are the main prime mover of solar drying, so our main concern was on these two temperatures.The temperature achieved by SASD in the thermal collector is in the range of 55 ~ 60˚C meanwhile in the MASD temperature range is 65 ~ 70˚C.In SASD chili was dried in five days meanwhile in Modified Active Solar Dryer it took four days.The moisture content of the chili was reduced to 10% and it took 45hour for SASD and 34 hours for MASD.It is concluded that Modified Active Solar Dryer took 34% less time than the Simplified Active Solar Dryer.