Experimental Investigation on Indirect Mode Double Pass Natural Convection Solar Dryer with different Configurations of Absorber Plate (Radish) Srinivasan R.*, Dr. Balusamy T.**, Sakthivel M.*** *Research Scholar, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Government College of Engineering, Salem, Tamilnadu, India **Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Government College of Engineering, Salem, Tamilnadu, India. ***PG Scholar, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Government College of Engineering, Salem, Tamilnadu, India Online published on 9 November, 2016. Abstract An indirect mode double passnatural convection solar dryer was designed and fabricated with the loading capacity of 1kg to evaluate its performance using radish as a drying product. This paper presents the comparison ofthe performance of the collectors with different configurations of absorber plate of the collector. The different configurations of absorber plate are a flat plate, V-groove along the width (VAW), V-groove along the length (VAL), Sinusoidal along the width (SAW) and Sinusoidal along the length (SAL). The experiments were conducted during Feb-March 2016 in Salem, Tamil Nadu with the sample of 1 kg of radish having the initial moisture content of 95% wet basis from which 0.9 kg of water is required to be removed until it reaches the safe moisture content of 10% wet basis. The nominal surface area of all types of absorber plate is 0.5 m2 but effective surface area varies with configuration. The drying time was taken around 15.6 hours with the flat plate but it was taken only 10 hours and 11 hours with VAW and SAW respectively. Thus around 4 hours of drying time was reduced by using VAW and SAW than the flat plate and also the collector efficiency range was improved from 2.6–7.13% in the flat plate to 4.2–15.4% in VAW and SAW. Also, the quality of the dried radish was much superior compared to open sun drying. Top Keywords Double pass, Natural convection, Rayleigh Number, radish, VAW, SAW. Top |