Drying banana slices using photovoltaic ventilation solar dryer

Abstract

The economic value of bananas is quite low due to the high volume of production and the short shelf life of the fruit. One of the popular methods of preserving agricultural produce is drying. The objectives of this research include determining the drying kinetics curve profile of banana slices and the drying rate using a solar dryer, analyzing the profile of incoming and outgoing air temperature, solar intensity, air humidity in the solar drying device, evaluating the performance of the solar dryer in terms of drying efficiency, as well as measuring the quality and comparing the solar-dried banana product with the open sun method. The temperature profile of the drying chamber remained relatively stable, throughout the drying process due to the addition of photovoltaic panel to generate electrical energy to run the D.C. fans and electrical heater. The fastest drying occurs in solar drying of photovoltaic ventilation with temperature of 60oC with a drying time of 8 hours and resulting in moisture content of 8.57%. The drying rate in solar instruments of photovoltaic ventilation at variable temperatures of 60oC, 50oC, 40oC and open sun drying has an average drying rate of 0.0921 g/min, 0.0784 g/min, 0.0653 g/min, and 0.0529 g/ min, respectively. The drying rate decreases as the drying time increases. The average efficiency of the dryer at 40°C, 50°C and 60°C, were 3.109%, 3.393% and 3.915%, respectively. For the quality analysis of the dried banana slice, the structure of dried banana slices with SEM analysis tends to be irregular and the surface was smooth. There were 20 compounds detected by GCMS method in dried banana slices, where there were five compounds that had the widest area or the largest presentation, namely 26.22% hexadecanoic acid, ethyl ester (CAS), 24.59% ethyl oleate, 5.47% silan, triethyl-fluoro-, 5.05% bis(2- ethylhexyl) ether and 4.83% ascorbaric acid (Vit-C).