PHYSICAL FACTROS AFFECTING LONGAN DRYING

Abstract

This work presents experimental performance of a solar dryer for drying longans. The dryer consists of a polycarbonate sheet covered on a concrete floor. The dryer is 9 m in width, 24 m in length and 4 m in height. Nine 15-W DC fans powered by two 50-W PV modules were used to ventilate the dryer. To investigate its performance, the dryer was used to dry twelve batches of longans. For each batch, 1,000 kilograms of longans were dried in the dryer. Results obtained from the experiments showed that drying temperatures varied from 32^๐C to 65^๐C. The drying time for drying longans was 5 days, compared to 7 days required for natural sun drying. Longans dried in the dryer were completely protected from rain and high-quality longans were obtained. In addition, A study of the neural network model of the solar dryer. Numerical solutions were obtained using C⁺⁺ programming. The results showed that the moisture content of longan calculated from the model corresponds to the measurement result. The RMSD value was 4.9% and the R² was 0.9731.