LAUSR

Open drying is practiced for drying Capsicum frutescens in the cottage industries of India. In order to improve drying, an experimental set-up of solar rack dryer is constructed and studied different heat transfer augmentation techniques. A passive heating coil extended from the header of a water-in-glass evacuated tube coupled with parabolic trough is used to augment the heat in the collector section of the dryer. The drying rate in rack dryer is found to be 62% higher than that of open air drying of green chillies. Moreover, the drying rate in augmented rack dryer is found to be 7% higher than that of rack dryer. In addition to this, an effective design for the dryer cabinet with respect to air circulation is arrived through computational fluid dynamics analysis. Through this new design, the drying rate is improved further by 3%. Based on energy analysis, the specific energy consumption during the drying of this particular product using the augmented dryer is found to be 1.27 kWh/kg. The exergy efficiency of the drying chamber is found to be in the range of 4%-45% with an average of 16% for Capsicum frutescens.