Experimental Investigation On Solar Coconut Drying Unit Using Gsm

摘要

Conversion of coconut shell to copra is one of the time and labor consuming post harvesting process in coconut industry. Conventionally this is done by exposing the coconut shell to open sun light. The major drawback of this technique is that due to unpredictable temperature and atmospheric humidity, the dried copra get infected with fungus which ultimately spoil the quality of extracted oil. In addition it takes 3 to 4 days to dry the coconut shell for proper extraction of oil. In a pioneer work, on design and development of a suitable technology for coconut shell drying. However, the closed nature of drier unit increases humidity in the closed atmosphere in the initial stages of drying which if unmonitored spoils the quality of dried copra. Thus monitoring of temperature and RH% in the closed net is done manually and a door placed at the top of net is opened if RH% of the closed space goes above certain value [1]. To reduce the manual labor in monitoring the temperature and RH% of the closed net, in this paper we design a sensor based electronic hardware that monitors the temperature and RH% of the closed drier unit and maintains the same at preset value by automatic opening and closing of the top door using motor. In addition the proposed hardware unit uses GSM module to convey the temperature and RH% values inside the drier unit to the customer at a distant place in fixed time intervals