resumo
- This article presents an overview of passive solar dryers, an ancient technique that may be revived for food drying capacities below one ton/day. The art of dehydrating food has existed for centuries and was developed to preserve food by extracting its water content, thus delaying its natural deterioration. This article reviews traditional solar dryers and proposes a verification parameter k, parametrising the solar collector’s size by the drying capacity. The modelling and parametrisa tion of the k constant allowed the evaluation of the examples of tra ditional models from the literature systematically. Results showed that 80% of the evaluated constructed solar dryers might underperform due to lower solar collecting surfaces than those projected by the k parameter.