Review on solar dryers for drying fish, fruits, and vegetables

Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. 2022 Jun;29(27):40478-40506. doi: 10.1007/s11356-022-19714-w. Epub 2022 Mar 28.

Abstract

India is one of the highly developing countries in the world and it has the second-largest agricultural source of income, which covers 61% of the entire income of the country. The most valuable income group, by giving the appropriate training in this technology, will make their entire country to become one of the most highly developing counties in the world. In recent years, many developing, developed, and underdeveloped countries face shortages of fish, fruits, and vegetables due to natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunami, and any other unexpected events. Now the main issue of this paper is to preserve the food products from post-harvest to consumer-level, which cover 60% of losses due to the unavailability of preservative methods. This paper mainly focused on the conventional methods to advanced solar drying technologies for perseverating fish, fruits, and vegetables and also it discusses the technology used for drying the yield range of fish like Atheriniformes, Catfish, Chilwa, etc. Fruits like banana, mango, and papaya, and vegetables like bitter gourd, cabbage, and cocoa beans have been reviewed and also discussed some problems along with their solutions in concern with food products drying, thereby the selection of dryer for drying products will be made easy by this review article. On the whole, this investigation would help researchers in fish drying to choose the better drying methods for acquiring better results for particular fish, fruits, and vegetables that enable any entrepreneur to select the appropriate method reducing the cost and time.

Keywords: Fish drying; Food preservation; Fruits drying; Solar energy; Vegetables drying.

Publication types

  • Review

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Desiccation / methods
  • Fishes
  • Food Handling / methods
  • Fruit*
  • Sunlight
  • Vegetables*