Techno-Economic Assessment of a Solar Drying Plant Using Concentrated Solar Power Technology and Eutectic Pcm Mixtures for Thermal Storage

Solar drying for food products is a cost-effective and environmentally friendly technology that is widely used in lowtemperature drying processes. In this paper, a Solar Drying Plant (SDP) design based on Scheffler Dish technology with a Thermal Energy Storage (TES) system is proposed. The main goal is to dry <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$200-250 \text{kg}$</tex> of sliced food products by blowing hot air. The yearround performance and techno-economic analysis of the designed system is evaluated. To reduce the initial investment cost of the designed system, ten different eutectic mixtures of phase-change materials (PCM) are studied and compared, and the most suitable material is selected for the study considering many economic factors, such as, net present worth, payback period, life cycle cost savings, and interest rate of return. Results show that the ternary eutectic mixture of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\text{NaOH}(85.8 \%)-\text{NaCl}(7.8 \%)-\text{Na} 2 \text{CO} 3(6.4 \%)$</tex> is the most profitable PCM among others.