Thermal Performance of a Solar Dryer with Oscillating Bed for Drying of Non-parboiled Paddy Grains

There are many solar dryers for drying agricultural produce. This article explains the drying methodology and the thermal efficiency of the solar dryer with the bed tilted to a certain angle and oscillated at a particular frequency while drying non-parboiled paddy grains. The oscillating bed solar dryer dried 36 kg of non-parboiled paddy grains in just a day to the required level of moisture content, and the average moisture present in the dried grains was 13.56%. The average dryer thermal efficiency was 26.3%. The specific moisture extraction rate was 1.11 kg/kWh.