A case for including solar dehydrators in food processing
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resumo
The access of small-scale food producers and big agro-industry players to equipment
is abyssal. The latter have access to well-developed and appropriate technology. In this article,
one proposes a novel design for food dehydration equipment to serve small-scale producers,
reducing their technological gap regarding dehydration. Equipment that dries more than 1000
kg daily is costly and consumes much energy. Lower capacity machines, up to 100 kg per day,
are often one-off handcrafted projects built with reused materials without dimensioning
supporting the design. They are usually not easily transportable and underperform: the drying
chamber tends to overheat; the solar collector's area is usually 50% inferior to the required
product quantity. One proposes a mobile dehydrator with a solar collector area 7 times larger
than average, promoting moisture removal by naturally convected airflow at lower
temperatures, reaching up to 4,5 m/s and 44,3 °C inside the entrance of the drying chamber.
Under these flow conditions, the food's organoleptic properties are preserved compared to the
often high-temperature drying handspun machines continually adopted by small-scale
producers. The internal layout of the drying chamber was also changed to promote the increase
of turbulence and reduce the existence of recirculation areas, thus facilitating the transfer of
moisture from the food to the airflow. The expected result from implementing this novel design
is avoiding food losses due to natural degradation by increasing the product's shelf life before
transport and transformation. Solar equipment has zero operational costs, and all these
advantages are expected to encourage small-scale dehydration technology.
