• Korean Journal of Agricultural Science
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.357-370
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• 1982

Recent concern regarding price and availability of fossil fuels has spurred the interest in alternative sources for farm crop drying. Among the available options such as biomass energy, wind power, nuclear energy and solar energy etc., the increasing attention is being directed to the utilization of heat from solar energy especially for farm crop drying. Even though solar energy is dispersed over a large land area and only a relatively small amount of energy can be simply collected, the advantages of solar energy is that the energy is free, non-polluting. The study reported here was designed to help supply the informations for the development of simple and relatively inexpensive solar warehouse for farm crop drying and storage. Specifically, the objectives of this study were to determine the performance of the solar collector fabricated, to compare solar supplemented heat drying with natural air drying and to develop a simulation model of temperature in stored grain, which can be used to study the effects due to changes in ambient air temperature. For those above objectives, solar collector was fabricated from available materials. Corrugated steel galvanized sheet, painted flat black, was used as absorbers and clear 0.2mm polyethylene sheet was the cover material. The warehouse for rough rice drying and storage was constructed with concrete block, and the solar collector was used as the roof of warehouse instead of original roofing system of it. The results obtained in this study were as follows: 1. The thermal efficiency of the solar collector was average 26 percent and the overall heat transfer coefficient of the collector was approximately $25kJ/hr.m^2\;^{\circ}K$. 2. Solar heated air was sufficient to dry one cubic meter of rough rice from 23.5 to 15.0 percent in 7 days and natural air was able to dry the same amount of rough rice from 20.0 to 5 percent in l2 days. 3. Drying with solar heat reduced the required drying time to dry the same amount of rough rice into a half compared to natural air drying, but overdrying problems of the bottom layer were so severe that these problems should be thoroughly analyzed. 4. Simulation model of temperature in stored grain was developed and the results of predicted temperature agreed well with test results. 5. Based on those simulated temperature, changes in the grain-temperature were a large at the points of the wallside and the damage of the grain would be severe at the contact area of wall.