Review on Solar Energy Dryer for Drying the Agricultural Products

This paper presents direct solar dryer for drying application likes as fruits, vegetables, and spices. Previous efforts on solar drying and recent developments of direct solar dryer for drying of cereal grains, fruits, vegetables and spices in the rural areas of the tropic and sub-tropic are critically examined in terms of drying performance and product quality and economic. The unpredictable rise and frequent scarcity of fossil fuel accelerated the continuous search for an alternative power source. Solar is one of the renewable and sustainable sources of power that attracted a large community of researches from all over the world. This is largely due to its abundant in both direct and indirect form. As such the development of efficient and inexpensive equipment for the drying of agricultural products using solar power evolved thereby improving the quality of the product as well as improving the quality of life. In this paper a review of direct solar is presented. It has been observed that use of direct solar dryer under natural convection and forced convection reduces moisture in very less time as well as drying rate is very fast than the sun drying.