Smart agriculture through using cost-effective and high-efficiency solar drying

Challenges must be handled in an integrated manner when addressing food security and climate change. More efficient designs for food production systems, as well as their logistics, are needed in order to increase food production and to reduce emissions intensity. Specifically, any enhancements done on this purpose would contribute to mitigating climate change. Five important dimensions are being considered in smart agriculture: food security, availability, accessibility, utilization, and stability.

Food supply-demand chain can seriously be effected by uncontrolled population growth. Thus, any perspective to solve these uncontrolled conditions can have a positive impact. Especially giving emphasis on reduction of food losses via expoloring various ways of production, or increasing productivity, or ensuring food security are effective ways for solutions. For example, the use of solar drying for agricultural, marine or meat products is very important for preservation, thus minimizing food losses. However, traditional sun drying is a relatively slow process. Also, the product quality worsens due to several factors: microorganism growth, enzymatic reactions, insect infestations. It is known that utilizing solar energy involves several factors that need attention. Thus, a lot of effort is directed toward improving solar energy technology for drying processes.

This study presents a smart agriculture design for drying using low cost and highly-efficient solar selective absorber. The system is based on an air heating flat plate solar absorber. Levelized cost of heat (LCOH) for the prototype using solar renewable energy is calculated and compared with the fossil fuel energy sources; natural gas, electricity, and liquified petroleum gas (LPG). In addition; a comparison of the costs for air collectors using various selective absorbers; unglazed or glazed, is presented. It is shown that solar energy, in the long run, will be more advantageous compared to fossil fuels.