I and new Intern Nikita had a visit to Sahyadri school. The purpose of this visit was to collect feedback from our customer. also, there was slightly Maintenance work with dome dryer. below details report of our visit

Report of Visit

Objective

  1. Visit Sahyadri School to collect feedback of Dome dryer
  2. Identifying problems related to dome dryer installed in Sahyadri school
  3. Maintenance of dome dryer

I and Intern Nikita visited Sahyadri school on 8th June 2019 to Identify problems related to dome dryer installed there and to do maintenance of it. We identified problems they are facing and took their feedback about dome dryer working.

After visiting the school in the morning, we asked some general questions to Rajashree aunty and other staff who were involved in opperating Dryer. We asked about their experience informally. Ina long discussion and interviewing we had a lot of positive outcomes but there were some issued mentioned ahead

According to them, Chikoo took 8 days to dehydrate. They dried 6 kg Chikoo in dome dryer and they got 600 gm dehydrated Chikoo. They had a positive experience with the taste and color of dried Chikoo did not change. The food value of dehydrated Chikoo remains the same as the original. They told us that there were happy with the functionality of the Dryer. The issued face bu the customer and the users were:

  1. Moisture content increases at night as humidity increases
  2. Rehydration happen due to fog
  3. Structural Integrity was poor
  4. Wires were bent during shifting plates.

After identifying issues, we asked them about what type of vegetable and fruits they dried in Dome dryer so, they dried 7 substrates,

  1. Chikoo                     4. Banana                  7. Cluster bean
  2. Ochro                      5. Tomato
  3. Mango                     6. Onion

Okra took 4 to 5 days to dry. Mango slices will dry in 8 days and because of sucrose, dehydrated mango slices didn’t get hard after drying. The banana will dry in 4 days and they dried 5kg banana slices and they got 500 gm dehydrated banana. One thing is common in all these substrate dehydrations is the taste and color didn’t change that much.

  • Mango and Banana
  • Dried Chickoo
  • Rajashree aunty preparing Onion batch

We tasted samples and they were excellent in taste. Rajashri aunty works on dome dryer there and their feedback encouraged us to make more than enough for dome dryer, she said,

  1. Dome dryer is easy to operate.
  2. Substrate dries easily and in possible minimum time.
  3. Taste of dehydrated product is good.
  4. Functionality of dryer is good.

Maintenance of dryer:

  1. We set the dome dryer properly. We tightened all the fasteners. Also, there was a misalignment in the Tray structure which we corrected
  2. Some wires were not in proper position because of inappropriate handling they made that proper. We applied some tension to the wire
  3. We did insulation of trays. for avoiding cutting due to sharp edges we applied insulation tape as shown the figure
  4. we guided with how to operate dome dryer properly.
  • Giving tension support wire
  • Aligning tray structure

Feedback from customer:

  • The functionality of the dryer is excellent.
  • The dryer gave a very good quality product
  • The structure of the Dryer was a bit loose and need more sturdiness
  • The built quality of dryer was felt poor
  • They wish to purchase more dryers for more production.
  • Colour retention of the product was excellent.