DESIGNING, MANUFACTURING AND PERFORMANCE EXPERIMENTS OF HEAT PUMP RED PEPPER DRYER ASSISTED SOLAR ENERGY

Abstract

In this study, redpeppers were dried in a heat pump dryer assisted solar energy. Redpeppers have been dried from initial moisture content (10.81 g water/g dry matter) to final moisture content (0.16 g water/g dry matter) by using heat pipe solar collector and air to air heat pump system. In the drying system, 24 h drying period was provided heat pump support. In PID controlled dryer, air velocity changed according to the temperature value which is set in process control device. Redpeppers were dried at 50 degrees C dry bulb temperature and average 0.4 m/s air velocity in a period of 210 min. According to experiment results, average heating coefficient performance (COPwh) and specific moisture extraction rate (SMERws) were calculated for whole system as 2.24 and 0.209 kg/kWh respectively.