Development of an Automated Solar Powered Hot-air Supplemented Dryer

The world is facing two major challenges: one is to meet the exponential growing demand for energy particularly in developing and underdeveloped countries and other is to deal with global, regional and local environmental impacts resulting from supply and use of conventional energy. The cost-effective technology for solar drying that can be easily adopted among the rural farmers of developing countries needs to be developed in areas where solar energy is abundantly available. As cheap as the solar energy could be, there are associated problems with the stability of the energy for different purposes due to instability of climatic conditions. For this research, a solar powered hot-air supplemented dryer (SPHSD) with a capacity of 20 kg of sliced yam was designed and developed. The SPHSD has three sections which are solar collector chamber, drying chamber and hot-air supplement chamber which is powered with two 150-watt solar panel and a 200 amps solar battery for continuous operation during bad weather. All data were logged digitally for accuracy and test was done using yam slices. Difference in drying time and stability in drying temperature was evaluated using SPHSD and indirect solar dryer. The result shows stability of temperature in the drying chamber when SPHSD was used while the drying temperature fluctuates throughout the indirect solar drying test period. Drying experiment was conducted for 481 minutes (between 0910 hrs to 1713 hrs) reducing the moisture content from 71.91%, 72.1% and 72.8% to 27.95%, 25.78% and 28.23% for MC1, MC2 and MC3in wet basis respectively. Drying experiment was conducted for 832 minutes (between 0901 hrs to 2257 hrs) reducing the moisture content from initial moisture content levels of 72.66%, 71.48% and 71.48% to 13.47%, 12.53% and 12.54% for MC1, MC2 and MC3in wet basis respectively.