Comparative assessment of solar and heat pump dryers with regards to exergy and exergoeconomic performance

In this paper, the evaluation of exergoeconomic analysis of two different drying technologies was performed. Components of both systems were handled individually by considering the exergy efficiency, cost performances, and exergoeconomic factor values. Thus, the contribution of components of both solar dryer and heat pump dryer to the costs were examined in detail and suggestions for improving the systems were presented. The main purpose of this study is to compare the energy consumption performances and costs of two different drying systems. As a result of the experiments, exergy efficiency, minimum exergy destruction cost, and minimum exergoeconomic factor values were determined as 75.52%, $0.0044/h and 0.514 for solar dryer, 72.49%, $0.060/h and 0.045 for heat pump dryer, respectively. It was observed that the most important components that need to be improved in terms of the exergoeconomic factor are the fans in the solar dryer and the condensers in the heat pump dryer. The results showed that exergoeconomic analysis is an important approach that should be used to clearly determine the energy and exergy costs of drying systems. Thanks to these analyses, it was clearly observed that the performance and cost improvements of system components can be performed effectively. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.