Efficiency study of a single day smoke dryer

Abstract

The energy utilization and the time required to dry RSS using conventional type smoke house are significantly high. Also the conventional type smoking-room used for producing RSS gives large differences oftemperature and velocity; these result in non-uniform drying of the rubber sheets. In a conventional smokehouse, the energy losses due to loading and unloading of the sheets as well as time required for complete dryness is very much high.A Compact. well insulated drying unit with multipurpose gravel layer was designed and fabricated new operational practices for efficient energy utilization of Ribbed Smoke Sheet (RSS) Drying were also introduced. The overall drying performance was evaluated in term of drying efficiency and firewood consumption. Quality of the end product was also evaluated. A comparison also made against the performance of conventional smoke house. Social issues also compared with conventional system. The nevv system reduces the drying period from 5 days to one day. while space requirement also reduce by the same percentage when comparing with the conventional smoke house.No Significant difference of the quality of sheets dried using SS drying system against sheets dried in conventional smoke house was observed. However, dirt content in the sheets dried in the new system is lower tan that dried in a conventional system. The Single day Smoke dryer (SS dryer) has the efficiency of 51.7%. it is a very good value compared with a conventional smoke dryer which has the efficiency of 31%. The most interested feature of the SS dryer is the low space utilization compared with the conventional type smoke house and also the time requirement for t~1brication of the SS dryer is very short. In addition to the above advantages. the dryer can be operated by one person and the health issues arc very limited to compare with the conventional smokehouse.