Current Trends in Indirect Solar Dryer: A Review

Due to limited availability of fossil fuels, Mankind has to move towards renewable energy source and solar energy consumes great fraction of it. Therefore, lot of research is going on effective utilization of solar energy. Drying is an important thermal application of solar energy that is the moisture removal process from the product by simultaneous mass and heat transfer by heating the air around it to carry out vapor along it. Because of solar radiations are not available continuously the commercial use of solar dryer is limited. Therefore, researchers have presented different design modifications along with different thermal storage media in order to improve solar dryer performance. This review presents the various types of solar dryers and recent work done on solar drying technology to improve their performance.