Journal of Thermal Engineering and Applications Review Article
Design and Thermal Performance Optimization of a Solar-Assisted Pomegranate Dryer with Thermal Energy Storage
Abstract
Pomegranate is an economically important fruit crop whose post-harvest processing requires controlled drying conditions to reduce moisture content while maintaining product quality. Conventional open-sun drying is strongly dependent on weather conditions and can result in prolonged drying periods, contamination and non-uniform moisture removal. This study proposes the design and thermal-performance optimization of a solar-assisted pomegranate dryer integrated with thermal energy storage (TES). The proposed system consists of a solar air collector, drying chamber, thermal energy storage unit, air circulation system and instrumentation for monitoring temperature, solar irradiance, relative humidity and air velocity. The TES unit is introduced to reduce the effect of solar intermittency and maintain the drying-air temperature during periods of reduced solar radiation. A thermal-performance model based on energy balance, useful heat gain, collector efficiency, drying efficiency, specific energy consumption and moisture-removal rate is developed. A simulated dataset containing 720 operating observations is used to demonstrate the proposed optimization framework. Three operating configurations solar dryer without TES, solar dryer with sensible TES and solar dryer with latent TES are comparatively evaluated. Simulated results indicate that the solar-assisted dryer with latent TES can maintain a more stable drying temperature and improve the average thermal efficiency compared with the system without storage. Under the simulated operating conditions, the optimized configuration achieves an illustrative average drying temperature of 58.4 °C, collector efficiency of 64.2%, drying efficiency of 43.8% and specific energy consumption of 3.21 kWh/kg water removed. The simulated drying time is reduced from 12.5 h for the conventional configuration to 9.2 h for the optimized TES-assisted configuration. The proposed system demonstrates the potential of combining solar thermal energy and thermal storage for controlled pomegranate drying. However, all numerical performance values reported in this manuscript are simulated and must be replaced by experimental measurements before submission as an original experimental research article.
Keywords
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