Solar dryer eliminates inessential moisture content from the produce by its absolute dehydrating method. It maintains the originality of the chilies in terms of both color and taste. Solar dryers provide total safety from the bird or animal droppings, dust and dirt or any type of rain fall. This improved technology has many advantages over the traditional method. The advantages are that the rate of drying is faster and takes only a couple of days to dry, requires less space, and has a better color retention and pungency, offers hygienic and superior product, gives 2% more of yield. But we don’t have any idea about chilies, means what temperature is suitable for chilies, or how many space we have to design in the solar, and a lot of doubts were running in our mind, so we start to base line survey of chilies.
STARTING MONTH OF THE PROJECT ”DECEMBER”
In this month Vigyan Ashram decided to start the project. So for this this project Mr. Ranjeet Shanbag sir and Mr. Prasad Patil sir gave me the responsibility and I am very glad to hear this news. They told me that Mr. Patil sir lead the project from Vigyan Ashram and you have to work in his team, Patil sir is really good in communication so I felt very comfortable to talk on every matter with him. On very next day I started my journey with Vigyan Ashram, I went in a village their is some farmers of chilies. I met with him and talk with him about chilies weight, drying process, rate, and how they cropped chilies. And I also met a person who’s business is buying chilies and selling chilies, I talked with him on the buying process of chilies that how he buy chilies, how he checked moisture in the chilies then he told me that we checked moisture in chilies by moisture meter. Below is the picture of moisture meter.
DIGITAL MOISTURE METER DMA8.
- Measuring range is between 0 to 50%
- Temperature range is between 0 to 40°C
- Size of the meter (125h × 150w × 210d) mm
- It measure moisture % / 1 kg .
Digital moisture meter measure moisture content in various materials like chilies, corns, ajwain, chili fakes, dry ginger etc.
BASE LINE SURVEY (BETWEEN 18 DEC. TO 24 DEC.)
I started surveying in various fields first of all I went in a place their is farmer name Ankit who is good and regular farmer of chilies then I started my questioning with Ankit he response very well his latest harvest of chilies was 70 quintal. and he dried that chilies in 2100 square feet area.
He told me that we have to look mostly on space or area of the dryer. After this farmer I visited a lot of places and talk with many farmers of chilies on every small matters like how did they crop chilies? , What is the rate of chilies right now? , and how did they dry chilies? And they give me all the answers of my questions. A lot of farmers are facing difficulties to dry chilies because they don’t have sufficient space to spread their chilies, they also wanted to some extra feature like when they dried chilies they have collect spread chilies and then pack all the chilies in bags so most of time of the farmers are waisted in this process so they told me that if you did something in packaging of the chilies with the dryer then it was good for us. Here is the link of the collected data from the farmers.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TqTyvGHFfazeFAjmLtMUl-7b5VX2Lcn_Dm_sFMuVYJw/edit?usp=sharing
below is some farmers with their fields.
According to the farmers chilies crop is most expensive crop. And right now many farmers are facing difficulties to harvest chili crop due to virus and black thrips effects.
During this work I got some assignment as a video and some data about bubble dryer from Mr. Prasad Patil sir then I saw that video and the bubble dryer is really good for farmers it based on green house effect. below is the video of bubble dryer installation.
Hope you saw the video carefully. Bubble dryer is good in cost as compared to solar dryer and transport too we can easily carried it everywhere. But when I compared it with solar dryer then I find something about the strength, efficiency, space, layers and all. below is the table of comparison between bubble dryer and solar dryer.
| BUBBLE DRYER | SOLAR DRYER |
| It has low efficiency as compared to solar dryer | It has high efficiency as compared to bubble dryer |
| It got damage in storm or in heavy rain | It is much better in place of bubble dryer |
| It needed much space | It needed low space because of layers |
| It has only ground layer so it work for small quantity | We can manage 3 or 4 layers in this dryer |
| We have to flip the material in this dryer | In this dryer material got the air from both side |
| It needed plan surface to spread itself | it works in rough surface too. |
Bubble dryer is good to dry grains. It has a transparent material on its upper side but the outer side of the transparent material is remain in contact of external air so in my consult we have to made doble layer bubble dryer to maintaining the appropriate gape in upper side so the gape’s air will be warm by green house effect. If we do this then It increase temperature and efficiency of the dryer.
