期刊名称：International Journal of Advances in Engineering and Management
电子版ISSN：2395-5252
出版年度：2021
卷号：3
期号：1
页码：468-474
DOI：10.35629/5252-0301339344
语种：English
出版社：IJAEM JOURNAL
摘要：A proper drying process of agricultural produce is necessary not only to preserve and promote quality but also to minimize energy inputs. Tea production is not an exceptional in this aspect. Different methods are used in tea leaves processing that include Orthodox method, Crush Tear and Curl (CTC), open sun drying and solar drying. The motivation of this research work was to develop a solar dryer for green tea leaf drying in Mambila Plateau for local farmers. This is because the other methods are not favourable to them due to bad weather condition for open sun drying and high cost for the modern dryers. A Solar dryer of 5000 cm2 collector area was developed with 70Watts backup heater incorporated to the dryer with controller to maintain the drying chamber temperature between 350C and 500C. Different tests were carried out in order to evaluate the dryer performance. No load test (i.e test without any material to be dried) was performed indicating temperature rise up to 450C in the chamber with maximum collector temperature of 610C at an ambient condition of 26 0C, relative humidity 59% and solar insolation of 539.20W/m2 recorded without backup heater. The dryer performance was also evaluated using fixed tealeaves of 1.5 kg using three different test scenarios and moisture content and drying rate as performance evaluation parameters. The moisture content of the tea leaves was reduced from 82% (w.b) to 5.1% (w.b) without backup heater, 82% (w.b) to 5.4% (w.b) backup heater during sunset, and 82% (w.b) to 4.9% (w.b) backup heater throughout the day, the drying rates were found to be 17.1g/h, 23.14g/h and 36g/h, within 19 hrs without heater, 14 hours with heater in the night and 9 hours with heater throughout the day respectively. The total cost of the dryer was estimated to be N=61950.
