Author : Vaibhav. V. Pakhare and Sanjay .P. Salve

Drying is a one of the essential process for the preservation of agricultural food products. Products, especially fruits require hot air in the temperature range of 45-60ºC for safe drying. In this, work has been made to develop the compact and portable forced convection solar dryer for drying chilies with thermal energy storage. The performance of the solar dryer has been tested experimentally. Solar dryer is having capacity of 15 kg of perishable food items and it consist of the flat plate collector based air heating system with thermal energy storage, which used Paraffin wax as phase change material (PCM). The effect of mass flow rates of air on the temperature of the collector, dryer chamber, drying rate and drying time with and without implementation of thermal energy system has also been tested. The efficiency of solar collector and solar dryer has been calculated. Result shows that drying of chilies is technically feasible as comparison with literature, also the moisture content and the reduction in drying time. Temperature in drying chamber was observed 6-9 0C higher than the ambient temperature after sunshine hours up to 6-7 hours. Drying time for the chilies was found to be 17 hours with thermal energy storage system. In this present work, testing and experiment has been carried out in different cases: 1) Mass flow rate of air varies from 0.006, 0.008 and 0.01 kg/s. 2) With and without phase change materials.

Keywords: Solar energy, Open drying, Thermal energy storage, Chili drying.