Drying of agricultural crops by solar energy Original Research Article

The main application for solar energy in southern Mediterranean countries in agriculture is the drying of agricultural crops. The optimisation of dryers necessitates complete knowledge of the whole drying process, thus leading to energy savings and avoiding environmental pollution by using renewable sources of energy. We present a study concerning thermal behaviour of a solar air heater as a source of energy for drying agricultural products. In order to simulate the functioning of our solar collector, we chose a simple model based on the evaluation of different heat transfer coefficients in the collector and within the external environment, which allows determining the overall collector heat loss coefficient. Our purpose was to calculate the fluid outlet temperature, the output energy used and thermal efficiency as a function of ambient temperature, incident solar radiation, wind speed and air mass flow rate. The present suggested modelʹs results demonstrated that the air heater has paid off since we can attain the temperature on the order of 80°C at the fluid outlet and 60% in thermal performance.