PERFORMANCE EVALUATING OF HEAT PUMP DRYER USING R32 REFRIGERANT

Abstract

Drying is process of reduce moisture content of the product to shelf life long and increasing product value. It is well known that energy consumption of drying is rather high. Therefore, development of drying technique for energy saving is necessary. For this reason, heat pump drying techniques was investigated in this research. Heat pump dryer using R32 refrigerant, in this study was constructed for evaluating it performance and banana was selected as testing product. The experiments were conducted under the following conditions: dying temperature of 50, 55 and 60°C and air velocity of 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 m/s. The criteria used to evaluate the performance heat pump dryer consisting of drying rate (DR), specific moisture extraction rate (SMER), specific energy consumption (SEC) and coefficient of performance of heat pump (COP_h). It was found form the experiment results that increment of drying temperature and air velocity result in increment of drying rate and specific moisture extraction rate, whereas, decrement of specific energy consumption. Moreover, it was also found that drying temperature and air velocity did not affect significantly on coefficient of performance of heat pump. Finally, it was revealed from the experimental results that coefficient of performance of heat pump show in the range of 4.34-4.45.