CFD-Simulink Modeling of the Inflatable Solar Dryer for Drying Paddy Rice

Small-scale farmers in developing Asian countries have minimal agricultural mechanisms available to them. In the Philippines, postharvest losses in rice production can reach about 36% in the drying process alone. Thus, the inflatable solar dryer (ISD) was developed through the collaboration of the University of Hohenheim, the International Rice Research Institute, and GrainPro Philippines Inc. Although the ISD was successfully tested with different agricultural products, further characterization of the ISD design is required for predicting the drying performance. To this end, the airflow behavior in the ISD was simulated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) via ANSYS Fluent. Moreover, a thermal model was developed in MATLAB/Simulink by taking into account heat transfer in the heating area and coupled heat and mass transfer within the drying area. Three batches of drying experiments were performed and airflow measurements were taken inside the dryer to validate the models. The MATLAB/Simulink model was further used to predict the drying performance under various weather conditions spanning 10 years. The simulated temperatures and moisture content in the ISD showed high accuracy (mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) < 10%) with the experimental data. The proposed dynamic model provides an efficient computational tool that can be applied to predict the drying performance and to optimize the ISD design.

Review of solar dryers for agricultural products in Asia and Africa: An innovation landscape approach

Solar drying is one of the most efficient and cost-effective, renewable, and sustainable technologies to conserve agricultural products in Asian and sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. This review paper presents the different types of solar dryers that are widely used in Africa and Asia. In addition, the pre-eminent effects of their use on product quality, as well as their economic, environmental, and social impacts, are highlighted. Since financial, external, and structural factors play a key role in the adoption and scaling of solar dryers, this paper also discusses the impact of these factors on the effectiveness of solar drying technologies in selected Asian and SSA countries.

Applying CFD for Studying the Dynamic and Thermal Behavior of Solar Chimney Drying System with Reversed Absorber

This article provides numerical study of the solar chimney (SC) assembled with a reversed absorber and packed bed for the indirect-mode solar dryer. The present study was designed to determine the effects of using the SC in three configuration and physical proprieties of the packed (thickness and porosity) on the dynamic and thermal behavior of airflow. The results reveal that (1) using SC without storage material can increase the maximum mass flow rate up to 5%. However, integrating a storage material in the SC can improve the mass flow rate up to 32% during nighttime; (2) the use of a packed bed can decrease the crops temperature fluctuation until about 76% and increase the operating time of the solar dryer up to 12.5 hours rather than 10 hours in the case without packed bed; (3) increasing the porosity from 0.1 to 0.8 can increase the maximum temperature by about 10°C.