Design and construction of hybrid solar maize dryer.

Abstract

Maize is always harvested with a relatively high moisture content that makes it impossible to store. To minimize grain losses and thereby increase value and the profit margin of the farmer, a grain dryer is necessary for wet grains. Therefore, this paper presents the design and construction of a hybrid solar maize grain dryer. Properties of maize such as moisture content and bulk density at a particular moisture content were determined to get the required information for design of the hybrid solar maize dryer. The dimension of drying chamber, amount of moisture to be removed in a batch, quantity of air required to effect drying, volume of air required to effect drying, blower capacity, quantity of heat required to effect drying and actual heat used to effect drying were all designed for: A maize dryer was developed with a batch size of 15 kg wet maize grains. The dryer can be used to measure drying rates of maize at different initial moisture contents, drying air temperatures and drying air velocities. The effects of different drying temperature, air velocity, loading and agitating speed on the quality of dried maize can be investigated with the dryer: