Moreover, they found that the storage and chemical pretreatment have caused significant decreases of the drying time for all the investigated crops. Enibe [35] designed and evaluated a passive solar powered air heating system, for the crop drying and poultry egg incubation, consisting of a single-glazed flat-plate solar col lector integrated with a PCM as a heat storage material. The PCM was prepared in modules, with the modules equispaced across the absorber plate. The spaces between the module pairs serve as the air heating channels, the channels being connected to common air inlet and discharge headers. The system was tested experimentally under daytime no load conditions, over the ambient temperature range of 19-41 °C, and a daily global irradiation range of 4.9-19.9 MU/m2. These results showed that the system can be operated successfully for crop drying applications. Shanmugam and Natarajam [36] fabricated an indirect forced convection with desiccant integrated solar dryer. The main parts were: a flat-plate solar air collector, a drying chamber, desiccant bed and a centrifugal blower. The system was operated in two modes, sunshine hours and off sunshine hours. During sunshine hours, the hot air from the flat plate collector was forced to the drying chamber for drying the product and simultaneously the desiccant bed receives solar radiation directly and through the reflecting mirror. During off sunshine hours, the dryer was operated by circulating the air inside the drying chamber through the desiccant bed by a reversible fan. The dryer was used to dry20kg of green peas and pineapple slices, Drying experiments were conducted with and without the integration of desiccant unit. The effect of using a reflecting mirror on the drying potential of the desiccant unit was also investigated. With the inclusion of reflecting mirror, the drying potential of the desiccant material was increased by 20%. Approximately, in all the drying experiments 60% of moisture was removed by the air heated using solar energy and the remainder by the des ant. The inclusion of reflecting mirror on the desiccant bed caused faster regeneration of the desiccant material.