LAUSR

Abstract A prototype hybrid Photovoltaic Thermal (PV – T) solar dryer aided with Evacuated Tube Collector (ETC) is presented for drying of cassava slices under the meteorological conditions of Thanjavur, Tamilnadu, India. Further the morphological, structural and physical properties of thin layer drying kinetics are studied and compared with natural sun drying. The designed dryer reduces the moisture content of cassava from 91.5% (wb) to 10.67% (wb) which is considered to be a safe level for storage in 8 h. There is a wide scope to save the conventional fuel by adopting the designed solar dryer as the air temperature inside the chamber rise is 30–40 °C than the ambient temperature. Non – linear regression analysis is performed to find out the drying kinetics of cassava using IBM SPSS 23 statistical package. Two - term model is proved to be the most suitable model for predicting thin-layer drying behaviour of cassava slices with R2 = 0.982, χ2 = 0.017553 for hybrid dryer and R2 = 0.998, χ2 = 0.001247 for open sun drying. XRD results exhibit ‘A’ type crystalline pattern that indicates semi–crystalline nature of cassava for both hybrid and sun dried cassava. Structural, morphological and proximate composition analysis reveals that the quality of hybrid dried cassava is better in terms of physical and chemical compositions than sun dried cassava. The proposed hybrid dryer is capable of producing high standard dried products for exporting and can make a good profit.