Development of Direct Mode Natural Convection Solar Dryer for High Moisture Content Crops
Journal Title: American Journal of Agricultural Science, Engineering, and Technology - Year 2014, Vol 1, Issue 1
Abstract
Farmers find it extremely difficult and in most cases impossible to process and preserve high moisture content crops by normal open sun drying. In order to ameliorate this identified problem, five direct mode natural convection flat plate high moisture content solar dryers were designed and constructed with locally available materials. Sliced fresh ripened Ronita Cultivar tomato and mango as well as fresh okra, carrot and onion were used to test run the solar dryers. While the samples of the same crops dried in open sun were used as control. The tests were conducted in the months of January, February, March and April, 2005 and the average ambient values 31.4 oC, 16.11 %, 1.32 m/s and 570.9 W/m 2 for temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and solar energy radiation respectively, were used in the analysis. Evaluation of drying systems performances indicated that over 50 percent savings in drying time was achieved with the solar dryers as compared to the open sun drying. Also the system drying efficiencies of the dryers revealed that tomato, onion, okra, mango and carrot dried in solar dryers attained 105.85, 66 60, 64.25, 100.00 and 93.97 percent respectively higher than the system drying efficiencies of the same samples dried in open sun. Each of the dryers generated an average daily drying air temperature of over 49oC and less than 55oC.
Authors and Affiliations
A B Eke,
Keywords
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