Impact Factor (2025): 6.9
DOI Prefix: 10.47001/IRJIET
The main objective of the present work was to develop and evaluate a
medium scale green-house type solar dryer with capacity of 500 kg fresh grapes
(Thompson seedless variety). The dryer was developed, manufactured, and tested
under different operational conditions. The actual field tests for the studied
dryer could give real results for the performance of the dryer. The quality
evaluation tests showed the advantages of the tested dryer in giving high
quality raisin based on the Egyptian Standard of dried grapes (Raisins) No.,
285/2005 and the International standard ISO 21527 (2008). The results show
that, drying grapes with the developed solar dryer gives high quality product
competitive with the imported raisin with high safety in terms of microbial
infection. The results also showed that the developed solar dryer could reduce
the moisture content of grapes from 77.56 to 15.72% (w.b) within 19 hours. In
general, the approach leads to improving the traditional sun drying methods of
grape and also overcome the problem of higher energy consumption and capital
intensive of the large scale industrial grape dryers.
Country : Egypt