Preliminary Design Report for Application of Solar Energy to Industrial Drying of Soybeans. Volume II. Technical

摘要

The Gold Kist, Inc. extraction plant at Decatur, Alabama, employs three large continuous flow dryers for storage and for processing. The solar system that has been designed consists of 672 Solaron air collectors to temper the airflow into the existing dryer(s). The 1215 m exp 2 (13,104 ft exp 2 ) of collection area are expected to supply about 3.9 TJ/yr (3.7 x 10 exp 9 Btu/yr) representing about 27,000 gal of No. 5 fuel oil currently used in the drying operations. Since the solar system contributes about 6% of the annual energy consumption for one dryer, no thermal energy storage system is required. Interface with the existing facility is simply accomplished by three ducts which perforate the dryer house and inject solar heated air into dryer inlet airflow; there is no mechanical coupling between the dryers and the solar ducting system. A data acquisition system that provides data in several different forms has been designed to evaluate system performance. Manufacturers' data verified and extended by computer simulations and analysis indicate that the solar collectors of the solar drying system will operate at an essentially constant annual efficiency (some 52%). Additional analyses indicate that, with the solar drying system, the time-varying nature of the solar energy input will have no unwanted impact on the operation of the nominal bean drying process. (ERA citation 08:004708)