SIZING SOLAR-ASSISTED NATURAL-RUBBER DRYERS

Due to the lack of firewood, the use of solar energy in drying of natu ral rubber has been envisaged and it has been the subject of several w orks. The present work is concerned with the design of solar-assisted natural rubber dryers. The system performance is estimated using the a verage day method. The possibility of heat dumping and the configurati on of the collector array are taken into account. To facilitate the us er in making a rapid estimation on the collector area required, a simp lified sizing method is developed. To this end, an empirical relation is performed by correlating the results of short-cut simulation to des ign parameters which are easily determined. (C) 1997 Published by Else vier Science Ltd.