Meat Products Drying with a Compact Solar Cabinet Dryer

Abstract

The present paper presented the results of meat products drying with a compact solar cabinet dryer. To meet the requirements of the user, the participation research (PAR) and scientific research is required for investigation. Thus this paper will present both in term of qualitative and quantitative results. The methodology of this study comprises of four main steps such as (1) determine the conceptual design of the solar dryer cabinet (2) selection technology (3) design and fabricate of the solar cabinet dryer and (4) performance testing. For all of these four steps the user and the researcher team have been involved and participated closely. The results from the study found that the developed solar cabinet dryer is suitable for specific use of drying meat products. It is noticed that with the special design of preheating ambient air will enhance the ambient air temperature pass through the solar collector house. The drying results of the seasoning raw pork for the duration of two days showed that the average temperature of each drying tray is in the range of 45.75-48.63 degree Celsius. The temperature at uppermost tray is highest and the temperature at the upper tray is higher than the lower tray. The temperature difference among the tray is in the range of 1- 3 degree Celsius. In which showed that the temperature distribution of the drying tray is almost uniform throughout the cabinet dryer. The quality of the drying products was accepted by the users. With the uniform temperature within the solar dryer cabinet will help to control the quality of the drying products The comparison results between the percentage of weight loss for open sun drying and solar cabinet drying showed that under the same environment of drying, using solar cabinet dryer get the weight loss higher than using open sun dryer. The designed solar cabinet dryer is suitable for the drying products that require the optimum temperature in the range of 47-50 degree Celsius.