Shrimp Dryer Using Solar Energy and Thermal Storage System

Abstract

The objectives of this study were to: 1) design and produce shrimp dryer using solar energy and thermal storage system, 2) study the optimized parameters of shrimp dryer using solar energy and thermal storage system, and 3) study the economic feasibility of shrimp dryer using solar energy and thermal storage system. In this dryer, water was used as a thermal energy storage from a flat plate collector through heat transfer medium (water-air heat transfer). Meanwhile, the remaining thermal energy was passed through the thermal energy storage tank. The drying process of dried shrimps must be processed from fresh shrimps to control and record the optimized parameters that affected the quality of dried shrimps. The analysis of the test results employed the evaluation of parameter optimization efficiency.

In this work, water circulating system at 4 LPM, 6 LPM, and 8 LPM was investigated. The results showed that at the water circulation at 8 LPM, the operation of drying system showed the highest efficiency and the optimized parameters. The optimized water temperature from the solar panel ranged from 50 °C to 70^oC and the average ambient air temperature in the dryer ranged from 40^oC to 65 °C while the temperature inside the thermal energy storage tank was 50^oC to 62 °C. This result led to enhancement up to 85% for the solar thermal energy storage and thermal efficiency of the system was 65.18%. Additionally, the final moisture content of the dried shrimps was about 25 %db in line with the industrial standard of dried shrimp production of one day drying. According to the economic feasibility analysis, the break-even point value was 1.135 years.