Recent Trends of Hybrid Solar Dryer

Abstract

In most of the countries trends are agricultural product drying under the open sun. This type of drying method degrade the quality of product due external impurities are settle down on product, require lots of land for drying and decrease the drying rate. The efficiency of agricultural dryers could be increased through the use of a combination of solar and biomass heating sources, compared to conventional dryers with only solar or only biomass heating sources. The use of solar energy for, heating, distillation, cooking, drying, refrigeration and air conditioning and power generation is increasing day by day because of a high consumption rate of fossil fuels, round the globe and systems are there which performs on solar energy to fulfill the demand of, cooking, distillation, water heating, etc. Solar energy based drying techniques offer better return on investment to farmers. The drying process in the hybrid forced mode of operation is twice faster than the sun drying. Basically, there are three types of solar dryers; direct solar dryers, indirect solar dryers and mixed-mode dryers. This paper is focused on hybrid solar dryers. Drying proceeded successfully even under unfavorable weather conditions in the hybrid mode of operation these are the most cost effective type of dryers and are easy to fabricate and use. In this paper, we viewed different types of hybrid solar dryers and different design modifications applied to them in order to increase their effectiveness.