Design And Experimental Testing of A Solar Dryer Combined With Kerosene Stoves To Dry Fish

Indonesia consists of more than 13000 islands. Fish productions from the seas are very huge. Open-air sun drying is still the most common method used to preserve fish. The fisherman will have difficulties to dry fish in rainy days. To over come these problems, a drying system using heat source from oil fuel should be designed. Drying, in the other hand, is an energy intensive process. The objective of this paper is to design and to testing a solar dryer combined with kerosene stoves to dry fish. This solar dryer consists of a solar collector, a heating surface having fin rows, a heat exchanger as an air preheater placed in a chimney and drying chamber. The use of air preheater is intended to increase the drying efficiency. The solar collector area of 3 m x 4 m was constructed using a single layer glass cover of 5 mm thickness. Three major types of experiments consisting of drying process using solar heater, kerosene stoves and solar heater combined with kerosene stoves were conducted. Results showed that this solar dryer combined with kerosene stoves reduced the drying time significantly especially in number of effective days and prevented mass losses, and essentially provided better product quality. The efficiency of drying process using solar dryer, stoves and combination is 13.2, 14.9 and 13.4 % respectively.