ABSTRACT
Since many crops are seasonal in nature, there is, therefore, the need to find better ways of drying them for better preservation purposes to avoid shortages when such crops are out of season. In this work, the performance of a natural indirect solar dryer was evaluated using simulated and experimental methods, and validated using RMSE and NSE statistical indices. The systems performance in terms of the moisture content, drying rate, collector efficiency and drying efficiency were modelled using FORTRAN and simulated in TRNYSIS 16 and results compared with the experimental results. From the simulation and experimentation carried out, it was found that higher performance of the system was obtained by the simulated results, having 1.50% of moisture content, 9.40×10-3 g/s drying rate, 7.22% collector efficiency and 8.05% drying efficiency. The validation of the experimental and the simulated drying efficiency results shows that the Root Means Square Error (RMSE) which indicates the error between the experimental mean and the simulated mean was 10.208% for drying efficiency, while Nash-Sutcliffe Coefficient of Efficiency (NSE) value of -3.99 was obtained, indicating that the observed mean of the drying efficiency is a better predictor than the models drying efficiency. This work avails a study on the use of FORTRAN AND TRNSYS in modelling and simulating for a fraction of collector inlet air exiting into the dryer.
Key words: FORTRAN, TRNSYS, Root Means Square Error, Nash-Sutcliffe Coefficient of Efficiency, fraction.
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