Design and construction of a biomass dryer for mangoes.

Abstract

The mango fruit (Mangifera sp.) is major commercial tropical fruit, grown in many countries of the world. It is less common in Uganda because farmers and processors in our country suffer a problem of high rate of perishability of fruits leading to many flosses (Malachi Tumusime 2009) in addition to the capital-intensive cold storage and refrigerated transportation requirements that are beyond their technical. capabilities. (Final Draft Report on Citrus Market Study for Teso Sub Region sponsored by MAAIF-PMA in February 2009:) This project Came up as an attempt. to try and solve this problem through the design and of a biomass dryer for mangoes. This machine was designed to present an affordable, effective and sustainable tool to small scale processers and farmers for drying mangoes and also address the problem of fruit preservation and value addition to mango produce without many limitations since it utilizes biomass i.e. wood, brickets and dried mango seed covers, (90% of fuel in Uganda). The design followed a particular procedure starting with carrying out a detailed design analysis of the dryer, fabricating the different components of the dryer in form of a prototype, testing the fabricated prototype to determine the efficiency of the machine and its usability for the target group and finally an economic evaluation was carried' out to test the machine's cost effectiveness. The need for the construction of the biomass dryer came as a result of problems faced by mango farmers and small scale processors, all objectives were achieved and after testing the machine was proved to have a maximum temperature achievable of 670C and an efficiency of 67.4%. The machine was also proved to have the ability to remove moisture of 1.38kg from a 1.85Kg batch of sliced mango within 3Hours of constant heating.