Development and modelling of heat and mass transfer analysis of a low-cost solar dryer integrated with biomass heater: Application for West African Region

Abstract The main objective of this study is to design and fabricate a low-cost hybrid solar drying system and present the drying kinetics, heat transfer coefficient and thin layer models for the dried product. For this purpose, two solar dryers one equipped with biomass heater and the other without biomass heater were constructed and tested. The results show that the developed solar dryers can save between 27.78 % and 58.33 % of drying time compared to open sun drying method at ambient temperature ranging between 30 to 40°C and a humidity ranging from 55 to 70%. Under these operating conditions, the collector efficiency is 20.81% - 21.89 %. The values for the heat transfer coefficient ranged from 0.64 to 10.5 W/m2 °C. Verma et al model gave the best result for drying with biomass heater while logarithmic model was best for drying without biomass heater.