Design of Grain Dryer using Pressure the Flow of Air Heat Forced Convection Method

Abstract

The availability of such vast land so that the transfer to the agricultural sector which is large enough to be difficult to stem along with technological advances in agriculture will allow the farmers' businesses to be more enthusiastic in the hope that better growth in agricultural production will be achieved. On the other hand, it will reduce losses/loss of yields due to the production process so that there is an improvement in the application of harvesting and postharvest technology which seems to be a prospective source of production growth. In its development, local farmers in Merauke using the rice drying method still use the old method, namely drying in the hot sun in an open field. If the weather is favorable, the drying process will not take up to 14 days and sometimes if the field or yard is not enough, someone will use the services of someone else to dry it. This also raises complaints because the costs that must be incurred by farmers will be even greater. The research developed is to design a rice grain dryer where the characteristics or drying method is a dryer with hot air/gas pressure produced from the combustion process in the furnace. The objectives of this research are to design a dryer installation that can dry grain effectively, efficiently and economically with the Pressure Flow Heat Forced Convection method as an air heater in the drying room, determine the percentage of grain moisture content with free convection and forced convection with drying time, and calculate the efficiency of the dryer installation with forced convection as a hot air sucker from the combustion furnace to the drying chamber and compare the results. The research was appointed based on the problems that exist in the community, especially in the Kurik district, Wonorejo village, Merauke Regency, Papua. This research is also a manifestation of the vision of Musamus University, which is to become a reference for empowering independent communities based on local wisdom through downstream research. The results showed that for testing the weight loss of grain, the best results were obtained between the 540th and 620th minutes with a weight of less than 15 g. So from 12 tons of wet grain that was dried after a drying process for 12 hours, the amount of water that evaporated for a 3 kg sample was 0.875 kg so that the dry grain weight was 2.125 kg. Total drying of 12 tons of grain to 10.5 tons. The total evaporation of water vapor in the grain is 0.875 x 12000 kg = 10500 kg (10.5 tons). This shows that the heat used for the rice grain drying process can be used optimally where the efficiency of the grain dryer installation is 71%.