Dynamic modelling and performance study of solar gas tunnel dryer

The work presented in this article focuses on the analysis and modelling of heat and mass transfers in the tunnel dryer during the drying of agricultural products. The main objective of this work is to establish a global modelling of the studied system based on the bond graph methodology. The pseudo-bond graph methodology was used in modelling the system. Such methodology was very suitable for this thermal process since it allows good management of the nonlinearity present in the system.The thermal performance of the proposed dryer is analysed by solving the various energy balance equations. An application of drying tomatoes was achieved and a fair agreement was observed between predicted and experimental results.