Harnessing The Sun To Dry Grain

Press, Volume C, Issue 29709, 30 December 1961, Page 7

Harnessing The Sun To Dry Grain

TTSZ at energy derived from the sun is expected to become popular among American farmers for the drying of grains, and it is probable that farmers in other parts of the world will follow the American lead. Maize dries better and faster by a solar-heated, air system designed by agricultural engineers at Kansas State University and the United States Department of Agriculture than it does with the conventional unheated air

report from Manhattan, Kansas. Under testing with experimental equipment, fans of the solar system used only half as much electricity to power them as do driers in general use today. Scientists are redoing the solar-heated air system with the expectation that its efficiency of operation and drying capabilities will be increased even further. Their studies had produced such promising results, they said, that they would be continued* with the hope that a revolution in grain drying would be achieved. R. I. Lipper, of the Kansas State Experiment Station, and C. P. Davis, Jun., of the United States Department of Agriculture, leaders in the development of the dryer, found that in one week solar-heated

air reduced the moisture content of 100 bushels of maize from 1? to 11 per cent. A conventional dryer used as a control dried an identical amount of corn to U per eent. moisture to the same time, but portions of the top layer still contained 14 per cent moisture. Overdrying occurred in the bottom layers of each device, but was somewhat areeter to corn dried by solar-heated air. Both systems circulated air through the grain at the rate of four cubic feet per minute. The two leaden in the tests say that their experiments show that grain containing up to 18 per cent moisture can be dried adequately with the solar-heated air system. The dryer will do thia even when the sun shines only from 3.5 to 8.5 hours daily.