Performance Of A Tray Type Dryer With Variations In Air Speed Against Drying Rate

Abstract

Corn is a crop that plays the second most important role after rice as a food raw material. Corn has no less nutritional value than rice. Production losses during post-harvest handling are still very large due to improper handling. One aspect of post-harvest handling is drying, which aims to ensure that the corn consumed can be stored for a long period of time. An artificial drying system is needed as an alternative to overcome this problem, so the drying process with a Tray Drayer can be done at any time or not depending on the weather and location. The operating conditions in this study were drying air speeds of 2 m/s, 3 m/s, and 4 m/s and a heating temperature of 65 ºC. The dryer in this study used four stacking shelves. Each shelf is filled with 500 grams of corn. This research aims to determine the effect of variations in air speed on the drying rate of a dryer. The results of this research are that the greater the air speed used to dry corn kernels, the greater the drying rate. The average drying rate increases by 1.5% for each change in drying air speed variation.