Solar dryer is typically used for agricultural purposes in Indonesia. There are many economically important crops requiring storage or drying under particular environmental conditions such as temperature and humidity. High temperatures inside solar dryer prevents the growth of microorganism, and quickly reduce moisture content from the substance. A hybrid solar dryer is generally considered to provide the most optimum solution, however solar panels may be expensive and they still only provide heat or energy in the daytime. Hence, we propose here a new kind of hybrid solar dryer for 24/7 optimum conditions for crops - enabled by recent advances in energy technologies as well as Industry 4.0. This study aims to create an efficient, affordable and a self-sufficient intelligent energy system that will be applied to agriculture for storage or drying purposes by measuring the energy needs for the optimal drying system. Therefore, it is crucial to estimate and assess the critical energy needs for such new systems in order to optimize and design such smart solar dryer (SSD) system especially for Indonesia’s agricultural needs. We use design experience of our industry partner (PT Impack Pratama Industri, Indonesia) who has been working extensively on such solar dryer dome (SDD) based on polycarbonate material (only solar irradiation, no other technologies) and theoretical framework based on first principles in thermodynamics to estimate and assess critical energy needs for such dome with all the smart technologies. The calculation was performed based on Mollier diagram and the result still a rough estimation of energy required.

The immense food demand in Indonesia can no longer be satisfied by the current agricultural and plantation process. Both sectors need a more effective and productive solution to produce more food while also maintaining the quality. Yet, most of the farmers work in remote and rural areas where technology is an uncommon thing. Indonesia’s agricultural and plantation sectors are urgently in need of technological support to upgrade the processes, specifically for lower-to-middle class farmers. Emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligent (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) need to be adopted to system dynamics in agricultural processing, specifically drying stage. The drying model system that adopts the greenhouse concept, such as the solar dryer dome, is one of the promising drying methods. Implementation of industry 4.0 technology can optimize the solar dryer dome through several activities such as IoT that can track and organize the dryer data remotely or ML/AI that can automatically predict and control the dryer environment. This is proven by our developed smart solar dryer functionality and capability to support the agricultural drying process by utilizing IoT-enabled connection and AI/ML system. In this study, researchers review the development of solar dryer in Indonesia and provide the results from the developed smart solar dryer to optimize and encourage the development Indonesia’s agricultural industry which potentially improve post-harvest product quantity and quality.