Design and development of an active indirect solar dryer for cooking banana

Active indirect mode solar dryers were designed and constructed for drying of cooking banana in Umudike, Nigeria. The dryers were constructed with special focus on the air inlet, to examine if the air inlet area had effect on the performance of the dryers. The air inlet areas were considered in five levels and four shapes namely: square, rectangular, circular and triangular. A total of 52 dryers were required for the experiment, based on the combination of factors and levels of experiment using the Central Composite Rotatable Experimental Design adopted for the study. Fresh samples of cooking banana were obtained from a local market, peeled, cleaned and sliced to the desired thickness for the drying experiment. Open sun drying was used a control. Data was collected on a two hourly interval on each drying day between the month of January and March. The dryers were observed to reduce the moisture content of the products from 4.53 to 1.57 kg within 9 to 16 h of drying, while moisture was reduced from 68.97 to 12.00% (wet basis). The dryers were able to conserve almost 40% of the total drying time for the products when compared to open sun drying. The efficiency of the driers ranged from 13.85 to 31.84%. It was observed that the air inlet area of the dryer had significant effect on the efficiency of drying of the product.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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