Copyright © 2012 Yolanda Bolea et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

SDSim is a novel solar dryer simulator based in a multicrop, inclined multipass solar air heather with in-built thermal storage mathematical model. This model has been developed as a designing and developing tool used to study and forecast the behavior of the system model in order to improve its drying efficiency and achieving a return on the dryer investment. The main feature of this simulator is that most of the parameters are permitted to be changed during the simulation process allowing finding the more suitable system for any specific situation with a user-friendly environment. The model has been evaluated in a real solar dryer system by comparing model estimates to collected data.