Modelling of Indirect Solar Drying with and without a Thermal Storage Unit for Tomatoes

The present work presents indirect solar drying with or without a tomato drying unit and the mathematical modelling of the indirect solar drying system with or without a storage unit. Heat and mass transfer equations were used to predict the thermal behaviour of solar drying with or without a tomato unit. During the experiment, the tomatoes were dried to an average final moisture content of 0.12 kg_water/kg_ms with an average initial water content of 17.6 kg_water/kg_ms. The experimental data were fitted to eight (08) different mathematical thin film drying models. These models were compared using the coefficient of determination $R^2$ , Ki-square ${\chi }^2$ and the square root of the root mean square error RMSE. The results show that Page’s model best describes the drying curve characteristic of tomatoes. This Page’s model gives a higher value of determination $R^2=0.9942$ and lower values of Ki-square ${\chi }^2=0.02797$ and RMSE = 0.00704, compared with the seven (07) other mathematical methods used to describe the thermal behavior of tomato solar drying.