Perpustakaan Digital ITB

Experimental study on beef drying using solar dryer and a simulation program are presented in this report. The experimental work was carried out using solar dryer having 4 m2 of solar collector and 5 kg capacity of the drying chamber. For theoretical study, numerical heat and mass transfer using finite difference method is used in the program coded with Fortran programming language for simulating transient process of drying. The program uses constant drying air temperature input and some parameters relating to properties of product, beef, such as density, specific heat capacity, diffusion mass transfer are also assumed to be constant. In this approach heat and mass transfer are calculated in one dimensional only. The experiments involve beef samples having 100 mm width, 150 mm length and thickness of 3, 4, 5 and 6 mm and four velocities of air which are 0.2, 0.5, 0.55, 0.8 m/s. Electric blower was used to control air velocity in drying chamber. Temperature in the drying chamber varied with respect to the incident of solar radiation intensity. No auxiliary heat sources were applied. The program can be used to calculate moisture content, drying rate, product temperature, and drying time. The simulation and experimental results show a good agreement of the tendency of moisture content variation vs time.