In case of falling rain in some day during solar drying experiment by Indirect solar dryer integrated with PCM storage unit, can I shut down the dryer and continue next day? then how can I estimate the actual period of drying consequently the amount of water which dehydrated by the dryer?? thanks in advance.
Dear Mr. Khames,
You might use a load cell integrated with arduino to monitor instantaneous weight loss of the drying product.
Regards
I have already weighted the product before this rainy day and after that, at the beginning of the next day I weigh the product but during this day I left the product inside the drying chamber and it naturally lost some moisture. does that ruin the drying experiment or I can eliminate that day with its loss of moisture content and might mention what happened in the manuscript text?
Azim Doğuş Tuncer
Dear Tarek,
welcome,
The most important thing in the experimental work is to describe precisely what happens when one runs the experiment. So, you have to describe the changes during the drying experiment. Here the environmental conditions including the shut down period and the loss of moisture by natural evaporation. So, it is required to continuously monitor the loss of weight of the drying object.
Best wishes.
Best wishes
Thank you so much professor Abdelhalim for your sincere and valuable advice may Allah bless you Abdelhalim abdelnaby Zekry
My suggestion is that the dryer should not be turned off. Because this is the nature of experimental work. But sometimes we shut down the system or do the experiments again.
As dear Tarek pointed out, the environmental conditions are important including the shut down period and the loss of moisture by natural evaporation. As dear Tuncer pointed out, if you do not have a load cell integrated with arduino or other devices to monitor instantaneous weight loss of the drying product, in this case your work is difficult.
Solar drying is usually a time consuming process with some products taking several days to dry. One possible solution is to store the material in airtight containers during the nights or rains where loss or gain of moisture by the product is limited. In this context following work by Rabha and Muthukumar may be helpful.
Article Performance studies on a forced convection solar dryer integ...
In any case, proper description of the actual conditions encountered during the experiment is necessary as pointed out by Abdelhalim abdelnaby Zekry .
I think you need to assess the operation of the solar dryers under different conditions of insolation. That is for no shading and with shading.In practical cases you can run the dryer in rainy days. The most important thing is to protect the materials from rain.This is cover the nature of the sun drying process it self. You can run the experiment under various conditions but you have to tell all the parameters set in the experiment faithfully.
Best wishes
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