Development of solar air heaters & thermal energy storage system for drying applications in food processing industries

In the present work, the author has designed and developed all types of solar air heaters called porous and nonporous collectors. The developed solar air heaters were subjected to different air mass flow rates in order to standardize the flow per unit area of the collector. Much attention was given to investigate the performance of the solar air heaters fitted with baffles. The output obtained from the experiments on pilot models, helped the installation of solar air heating system for industrial drying applications also. Apart from these, various types of solar dryers, for small and medium scale drying applications, were also built up. The feasibility of ‘latent heat thermal energy storage system’ based on Phase Change Material was also undertaken. The application of solar greenhouse for drying industrial effluent was analyzed in the present study and a solar greenhouse was developed. The effectiveness of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in the field of solar air heaters was also analyzed. The thesis is divided into eight chapters.

Investigations on Stochastic Storage Systems with Positive Service Time

In this thesis the queueing-inventory models considered are analyzed as continuous time Markov chains in which we use the tools such as matrix analytic methods. We obtain the steady-state distributions of various queueing-inventory models in product form under the assumption that no customer joins the system when the inventory level is zero. This is despite the strong correlation between the number of customers joining the system and the inventory level during lead time. The resulting quasi-birth-anddeath (QBD) processes are solved explicitly by matrix geometric methods