Design and Fabrication of Food Dryer

The project started with the simple idea, ?What if Lays crisps were made without cooking oil or natural gas consumption right at Pakistani farms.? Pakistan is one of the largest agricultural producers in the world; especially in our 

Project Title

Design and Fabrication of Food Dryer

Project Area of Specialization

Mechanical Engineering

Project Summary

The project started with the simple idea, “What if Lays crisps were made without cooking oil or natural gas consumption right at Pakistani farms.”

Pakistan is one of the largest agricultural producers in the world; especially in our production of rice, potato, and dates. However, an average of 30% of our agricultural produce is wasted annually. Turkish, Indian, and Chinese Agri-tech approaches moved towards the processing of food items, for this reason, reducing their post-harvest losses. Pakistan can benefit from this philosophy by orders of magnitude relative to the market due to high levels of available solar irradiance in the country year-round.

This project aims to combine our agricultural and solar potential to develop low-cost food dryers that can produce export-quality snacks from local crops. The food dryers operate on a combination of three different technologies extracting energy from solar radiation with varying output entropies against different efficiencies. Solar concentrators are used in the project to heat air for convective drying. To alleviate the problem of scorching of food surfaces commonly observed in this sort of drying, the system moves towards solar desiccant drying over the drying period, trading efficiency for an increase in food quality. To reduce the drying time even further, a small Solar Photovoltaic system powers a Microwave heating the food item volumetrically. Important features of this product, based on the market conditions are an emphasis on the product’s end quality, drastically cutting costs, ensuring that the system is financially feasible for low-scale systems, and easy to maintain and operate for the household or farm-based producers.

Project Objectives

The objectives of this project are based on different criteria needed in combination to do the project into a financially feasible business. Here are the project objectives, in order:

1. Ensuring that the drying system produces a coherent product with the consumer criteria of consumers based in European countries, ultimately making the product competitive on international shelves.
2. Designing the system so that maximum energy load can be shifted to free energy.
3. Keeping the break-even point of the dryer within 12 months to make it feasible for small investors.
4. To obtain the status of an eco-friendly product (attractive to the export market) ensuring that the system is designed to leave a low carbon footprint in its production and low or no emissions in its operation.

Project Implementation Method

The prototype has already been developed and made functional to produce potato crisps.

Here are steps of implementation that have been completed till now.

1. Complete design analysis of the dryer.
2. Financial and business feasibility analysis of the production.
3. Material selection and procurement of components.
4. Development and testing of the prototype.

Here are the steps that are yet to be completed.

1. Standardized quality assessment of snacks.
2. Development of production-grade dryer.
3. Selection of packaging and quality assurance process.
4. Partnering with sales teams in other countries where the product will be exported to.
5. Development of marketing plan and setting up of sales channels.

Benefits of the Project

The project was initiated keeping in mind that it is intended at solving global and local food security issues. The benefits of the project are as following:

1. Reduction of post-harvest losses in Pakistan.
2. Increase in national exports.
3. Lowering imports of machinery needed for snacks production.
4. Competing in the market with unhealthy snacks as an alternative, positioning a change in the snacks industry.
5. Increase in revenue generated by small-scale producers.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

The project has clearly defined quantitative targets.

1. Cost per setup per production capacity (PKR-kg/setup-unit).
2. The unit cost of production of snacks (PKR/unit).
3. Quality of snacks: color report, micronutrient content, end moisture ratio (H, Vit. C %, X).
4. Levelised energy cost of setup (PKR/setup).
5. Unit Carbon emissions (ton-CO2/unit).
6. Production rate (units/hr).

Final Deliverable of the Project

Hardware System

Core Industry

Agriculture

Other Industries

Agriculture , Food , Energy , Manufacturing

Core Technology

Clean Tech

Other Technologies

Sustainable Development Goals

Affordable and Clean Energy, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

Required Resources

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