Environmental sustainability and exergy return on investment of selected solar dryer designs based on standard and extended exergy approaches

Different solar dryer designs are available in the literature. However, it is essential to understand how the performance of the dryer designs contributes to environmental sustainability by reducing waste in the exergy-loop and mitigate CO2 emission into the atmosphere. The exergy-based sustainability indices include waste exergy ratio, lack of productivity (LOP), sustainability index, environmental destruction coefficient and exergy recovery ratio. The paper also introduces exergy return on investment (ExRoI) by applying an extended exergy accounting approach with the inclusion of exergy influx of material resources, capital and labor in the exegetic computations of the sustainability index. Four solar dryers consisting of an indirect solar-cabinet dryer, mix-mode solar dryer, hybrid solar dryer and a double-partitioned single-pass-collector solar dryer with a wind generator were used as a case study. Comparatively, the ExRoI is lower than the standard exergy-efficiency for the four dryers by 6.87 to 91.61%. In contrast, the standard exergy-based sustainability index was higher by 5.4 to 61.2%. Total invested exergy ranged from 0.04TJ to 0.081TJ. The values of waste exergy ratio, LOP, ERR, EDC, and carbon credit ranged from 0.47 to 0.79, 0.566 to 16.45, 5.44 × 10−4 to 1.37 × 10−1, 1.57 to 17.45 and 231.45 to $2908, respectively.