The Optimization Techniques used in Solar Dryers: A Review

The energy from the sun is the most important source comprising renewable energy available on earth. The utilization of solar radiation for fruitful results are done in almost all the sectors such as industries, automobiles, preserving food items, electricity production etc. Solar dryers are one such device which utilizes solar energy to generate heat for drying food items of different kinds. Solar dryer's effectiveness might be enhanced and developed by optimizing the parameters of solar dryers with suitable techniques. The present research depicts the review on a number of categories of solar dryers enhanced and studied that are used in the present days along with different optimizing techniques used such as Taguchi, ANOVA, GA etc. Works done in optimization by several scholars used in order to dry out moisture content from different edible items such as mushrooms, fish, chillies etc. are discussed in this paper. Few of the techniques used in the optimization of the solar dryer which were mostly used by previous authors are discussed in the present paper. The paper also includes discussion regarding the utilization of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique for the same purpose.