Numerical study of papaya drying in a solar dryer

Developing an algorithm to digitally simulate the solar dryer of food products, case of papaya is the objective of this work.To achieve our objective, we first established the heat balances at the different levels of the drying cage, then these equations were discretized and solved using MATLAB software.The simulations made it possible to follow the evolution of the temperatures of the product and of the air, of the absolute humidity of the air and the kinetics of drying.It was found that the temperatures of the air and the product decrease along the drying cage, while the absolute humidity of the air increases.The temperature of the product during drying tends towards that of the air.The drying kinetics of papaya has a single drying phase, namely the decreasing phase.This study simulates the drying of papaya but it can be generalized to all food products.