DEVELOPMENT OF A SOLAR DRIVER

ABSTRACT Drying is a crucial method for preserving food, with solar dryers emerging as an environmentally sustainable technology. Dehydration of vegetables and other food crop by traditional methods of open-air sun drying is not satisfactory, because the products deteriorate rapidly, so the solar dryer is designed to have superior over the open sun drying when evaluated in taste and color. The objective of this work is to develop solar dryer using locally available materials. The designed and constructed solar dryer consists of two major compartments or chambers being integrated together, the solar collector compartment, which can also be referred to as the air heater, and the drying chamber. The solar dryer is placed at an angle of 17.11° to the horizontal. The theoretical and design consideration such as the area, volume, efficiency, weight of moisture loss and total time of drying was considered. The volume and area of the dryer are 0.0732m and 0.383m respectively. Also equipment such as beam balance, stopwatch, anemometer, and 12-channel temperature recorder are used to determine the mass of the sample used, drying time, wind speed and temperature respectively. The dryer was tested under no-load and load condition and the results were compared with open sun drying process. The sample used was Okro (Abelmoschus Esculents') and 76g of the sample was placed both in the solar dryer and in the open-sun respectively. The results of no-load give the maximum temperature of the solar dryer and open-sun drying to be 83.4° and 43.8° respectively. Solar dryer and the open-sun were able to remove 90% and 88% of moisture from the sample at 1 hour 15 minutes and 3 hour respectively. The drying time of the sample in solar dryer was 1 hour 15 minutes. More so, the efficiency of the dryer was determined to be 44.5%. Hie product inside the dryer requires lesser frequent attention compare with those in the open sun drying in order to prevent attack of the product by rain or pest (both human and animals). There is ease in monitoring when compared to the natural sun drying technique.