EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF EFFECT OF SOLAR-BIOMASS HYBRID DRYING SYSTEM ON DRYING RATE OF MAIZE

Abstract

Globally it is estimated that 84% of produced grains are wasted. In India 20-40% of food grains are spoiled, due to conventional preservation technique. The preservation tech like canning, freezing, drying etc are used in order to avoid the food wastage. Renewable hybrid drying system may be optimum for food preservations at low cost and will exploit at large in the present scenario. Proposed system of hybrid drying system is an integration of solar thermal air heating system coupled with air heating using suitable heating system based on biomass burning to maintain continuous drying process. Experiments are carried out for sun drying, oven drying, solar drying using air heaters and solar- biomass thermal drying.

It is observed that solar hybrid system using biomass as a fuel for heating has reduced time of drying maize. For only solar system hot air drying time reduced from 72 to 33 hours and for solar hybrid drying time reduced from 72 to 15 hours.