Design and Test of Unattended Solar Automatic Grain Drying Equipment

Farmers generally prefer solar drying for agricultural products drying when weather conditions are allowed.However，traditional artificial solar drying（TASD）has many problems，such as easy to be affected by the weather，rainy mildew and germination；high labor intensity（need to pave and furl in the morning and evening，and tedding frequently during drying）；lots of requirement to sunning ground（farmers have to choose road to dry for sunning ground limited，and then cause to traffic safety，vehicle rolling loss，and secondary pollution risk of emissions from cars，and benzene volatilization from asphalt road）.To solve above problems，a set of unattended solar automatic grain tedding and drying equipment（USAGTDE）was developed.USAGTDE adopts a soft waterproof type drying bag with zipper or pulling rope for fast grain gathering.It greatly reduce the risk from sudden raining.And it can be used as temporary sunning ground in paddy field after harvest，and then effectively solve the problem caused by drying on the road.Two sets of air bags are used in USAGTDE，assist with it automatic grain tedding system powered by solar，it greatly save labor inputs and improve the efficiency of drying.A prototype of USAGTDE was built and a relevant test between USAGTDE and TASD was conducted.Test results showed that water loss rate of USAGTDE was increased 39.3% compare with TASD.It proved feasibility and actual application effect of proposed USAGTDE，and also indicated that proposed USAGTDE has widely prospect in actual grain drying applications.