Monitoring of drying parameters in hybrid solar-electric dryer Using Node MCU
Abstract
Sun drying of agricultural products is the traditional method employed in most of the developing countries. Sun drying is used to denote the exposure of a commodity to direct solar radiation and the convective power of the natural wind. Solar drying can be considered as an advancement of natural sun drying and it is a more efficient technique of utilizing solar energy due to its renewable, environmentally friendly technology.
Nowadays drying agricultural products have great attention and there are various methods of drying fruits,vegetables such as dehydration, canning etc. due to this the quality of such product is degraded so solar dryer is used to avoid wastage, increase the productivity of agriculture,also the production in terms of quality and quantity. This project describes a controlled environment which is suitable for small scale agricultural products drying process within a closed chamber, using Arduino Node MCU. To start with, the sun rays are used to internally heat the fruit to remove the water content within the agricultural products.Then to maintain the humidity below a specified level,exhaust the humid air out of the chamber. Arduino Node MCU is used to control the functions of heating, controlling the speed of exhaust fan and giving time indication & maintain constant temperature throughout the chamber. The graphs of time versus drying process obtained show that the automatic drying unit designed has worked as per the expectation by consuming less time compared to conventional drying process.
