Enhancement solar dryer performance and collector efficiency of paraffin PCM/copper fin featured solar dryer

The increasing adoption of renewable solar energy sources offers significant opportunities for sustainable energy applications due to their economic benefits and the conservation of natural resources with eco-friendly and reduced drying time. Solar dryers play an important role in drying agricultural products; however, it found the challenges of heat loss, instability in varying weather conditions, and limited efficiency during periods of insufficient solar radiation. This study aims to enhance the thermal performance of solar dryers that incorporate paraffin phase change material (PCM) into a fin collector absorber for drying agricultural products, specifically banana and potato slices cut to 2 mm thickness. The investigation was carried out using three different setups: a conventional solar collector (Case 1), a solar collector featuring PCM (Case 2), and a solar collector with both fin and PCM configurations (Case 3). The experimental results reveal that in Case 3, the fin collector with the PCM-configured absorber exhibited the best drying performance among the three setups. It reached an optimal temperature of 60.8 °C, achieving improved moisture ratios of 0.51 for bananas and 0.54 for potatoes. The drying rates recorded for Case 3 were 0.89 kg/h for banana slices and 0.85 kg/h for potato slices. Furthermore, the collector efficiency increased to 75.3% for bananas and 78.7% for potatoes, reflecting improvements of 77% and 43%, respectively, compared to the efficiency of Case 1 (plain absorber).