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A cylindrical-parabolic solar-thermal converter, with 0.5m2 of capture surface, was manufactured and attached to a furnace, constituting an indirect solar dryer. Thermal balances of the elements of the receiver, housed in the focal point of this collector, are settled. A campaign of vacuum tests of this dryer indicated temperatures of the heat-bearing air in natural convection, along the absorber tube (70°C) and inside the drying cage (almost 60°C,on average). The average thermal efficiency of said converter has been evaluated at 50%.The higher the efficiency, the less the converter's capture surface is required and, therefore, less investment is required. These promising results testify to the effective performance of this new dryer compared to dryers with flat collectors, whose efficiencies could not exceed 40% despite the large surface area of these collectors.

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A nation's economic development can be measured by the capacity to effectively and efficiently convert energy resources into useful energy. Solar energy is an abundant energy in our country all year long. Burkina Faso is a country which has a very significant potential for sunshine almost all year round. Therefore, it is advantageous to create devices that will work through this energy resource. These devices can be used for many applications in thermal solar field like heating, cooking and drying. The parabolic trough type dryer is a device consisting of three elements: the concentrator, the collector and the drying chamber. It produces heat through the flow of air by natural convection within it. This device has the role of drying agricultural products. In this work, our task was to carry out temperature measurements of the air inside the parabolic collector solar dryer to determine the types of agricultural products that it can dry. The thermal behavior of the air inside the parabolic solar collector dryer is analyzed. The results show that the temperature of the air at the inlet of the collector increases by 9°C after passing through it and then decreases slightly before reaching the drying chamber. The difference in air temperature between the positions of rack 1 and 2 varies between 2°C to 3°C.

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