Trays Effect on the Dynamic and Thermal Behavior of an Indirect Solar Dryer Using CFD Method

The conservation of food products become more and more important in the last decades, especially because of the fast growth of the population around the world, which makes the drying method an interesting way to pre-serve the vegetal product for a long time. There is plenty of drying methods, such as electric drying, mechanic, solar …etc. this latter is so appealing due to its preservation of the environment. Our work is a contribution to the improvement of the drying process using ANSYS FLUENT, in which we use the meteorological data of Oujda city (eastern Morocco) to make this study more realistic. We investigate the trays effect in an indirect solar dryer, in order to find the optimum number of it as well their suitable position. The result showed that adding a second tray has improved both the velocity and the temperature distribution along the two trays as well for the chamber. But, adding a third one has decreased the velocity and the temperature along the two precedents trays as well it provides a bad distribution in the drying chamber. Regarding the position of the trays, we figure that the right position in our geometry is 0.35 m and 0.45 m for tray 1 and 2 respectively.