Simulating Forced Convection to Examine the Effectiveness of Solar Tunnel Dryers for Drying Agricultural Food Products
摘要
The key goal of this paper is to find out some enhancement parameters of a solar dryer and for this, a Computational Fluid Dynamics simulation of a solar tunnel dryer with a Quonset shape is accomplished. The temperature and velocity flow of air inside the tunnel dryer are studied using this simulation. The solar tunnel dryer can work in mixed mode with global radiation and the atmospheric air of temperature 300 K is forced inside the dryer at the air flow rate of 0.5 m/s. A steady fluid flow analysis is performed to evaluate temperature and velocity distribution inside the tunnel. It is found that because of mixed mode, a huge amount of agricultural food products can be dried in less time. To enhance the dryer's performance, proper insulation, and glazing of the transparent cover are suggested also the proper curved joints should be provided at the outlet section of the dryer.