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In the Chhattisgarh state of India, the Bastar region is famous for its various forest produce collected by local inhabitants. These collected forest produce are dried in open sun drying. This chapter presents the design and analysis of solar dryer which is simple in construction and a low-cost dryer. The construction of the solar dryer will be made of galvanized mild steel sheet absorbing the sun's radiation. The hot air will be taken out through a wind turbine ventilator at the top to maintain the required humidity level in the solar dryer. The analysis shows that the temperature inside the solar dryer is evenly distributed. The suggested solar dryer will reduce the drying time of the forest produce.

The upconversion (UC) of the rare earth doped MY2O4 (M=Ba, Sr, Ca) has been extensively investigated due to their potential applications in many fields, such as color display, high density memories, optical data storage, sensor and energy solar cell, etc. Many series of them, especially the Er3+, Yb3+ doped MY2O4 were studied in this chapter, due to the thermal and mechanical toughness, high optical transmittance from the ultraviolet to the infrared regions, and a low nonlinear refractive index compared to the other commercial laser glasses. The energy transfer (ET) mechanism of rare earth doped phosphor plays an important role in the upconversion process.