Design and energy assessment of a new hybrid solar drying dome - Enabling Low-Cost, Independent and Smart Solar Dryer for Indonesia Agriculture 4.0

Abstract

Solar dryer is typically used for agricultural purposes in Indonesia. There are many economically important crops requiring storage or drying under particular environmental conditions such as temperature and humidity. High temperatures inside solar dryer prevents the growth of microorganism, and quickly reduce moisture content from the substance. A hybrid solar dryer is generally considered to provide the most optimum solution, however solar panels may be expensive and they still only provide heat or energy in the daytime. Hence, we propose here a new kind of hybrid solar dryer for 24/7 optimum conditions for crops - enabled by recent advances in energy technologies as well as Industry 4.0. This study aims to create an efficient, affordable and a self-sufficient intelligent energy system that will be applied to agriculture for storage or drying purposes by measuring the energy needs for the optimal drying system. Therefore, it is crucial to estimate and assess the critical energy needs for such new systems in order to optimize and design such smart solar dryer (SSD) system especially for Indonesia's agricultural needs. We use design experience of our industry partner (PT Impack Pratama Industri, Indonesia) who has been working extensively on such solar dryer dome (SDD) based on polycarbonate material (only solar irradiation, no other technologies) and theoretical framework based on first principles in thermodynamics to estimate and assess critical energy needs for such dome with all the smart technologies. The calculation was performed based on Mollier diagram and the result still a rough estimation of energy required.