International Conference on Advances in Sustainability of Materials and Environment RCEE Research in Civil and Environmental Engineering www.jrcee.com Research in Civil and Environmental Engineering 2014 2 (03) 160-171 DESIGN AND TECHNO- ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF A SOLAR MATRIX COLLECTOR FOR DRYING APPLICATION M. A. Aravindh a* , A. Sreekumar a a Solar Thermal Energy Laboratory, Centre for Green Energy Technology,Pondicherry Central University, Pondicherry– 605014, India. Keywords ABSTRACT Solar thermal Solar air heater Wire mesh collector Dryer Economic analysis In the current world energy scenario, use of renewable energy is found to be exponentially increasing every year. India, being in the tropical region, has very good solar energy resource with nearly 300 sunny days on average. Many Solar PV and Thermal installations have been done to utilize the same. Hot air generation through solar air heaters is considered as one of the prominent applications of utilizing solar energy. Few developments have been taken place to utilize solar air heaters for applications like drying, process heating etc. This paper explains the development of a solar air heater with wire mesh as absorber, with nominal porosity for flow of air through it. The main advantage of this type of design is the hot air will not have contact with the glazing and hence top loss coefficient is minimized. The performance of the air heater is studied using a dryer as the end application. Thermal analysis of the air heater was done to determine its efficiency. Products, used in dryer, are different types of vegetable, say bitter guard and hence the study was done to compare the open sun dried and the solar dried samples. Economic analysis for the drying application was also investigated. 1 INTRODUCTION Solar energy is the primary energy source and all other energy sources are derived from solar energy. Direct utilization of solar energy can be done by two technologies, solar Photo Voltaic and Solar Thermal. Solar PV can used for direct conversion of solar energy to electricity whereas solar thermal can be used for converting solar energy to thermal energy or electrical energy by means of thermal power generation. Generating power from solar thermal technology requires concentrated technologies like Fresnel lens, parabolic dishes, parabolic troughs, concentration towers etc, which can produce high temperate of more * Corresponding author (E-mail: sreekmra@gmail.com). ISSN: 2345-3109