Identification of barriers and drivers to implementation of solar drying technologies

The requirement for energy is increasing day by day, and the available fossil reserves will be depleted shortly leading to various environmental hazards. Drying processes in industries, agriculture sector and house hold activities are being adopted using fossile fuel-based technologies. To reduce the GHG emission contributions, solar drying can be implemented in these sectors for various practical applications, such as product drying, crop and timber drying. A lot of work is going on in this field to improve the performance of solar drying systems, but still, ground implementation of such a system has not been encouraging so far. In this work, an attempt has been made to identify various barriers categorized as political barriers, economical barriers, technical or institutional barriers, and social and environmental barriers which can be taken into the consideration for better implementation of solar drying systems. Keeping this in view, this paper presents a clear insight into the reasons for the limited smallholder ownership of commercially available solar dryers. Also, several potential driving factors have been discussed to ensure the increased utilization of solar-thermal-based drying technology, contributing toward the sustainable development of society. Graphical abstract