Precoppe, Marcelo ORCID: 0000-0002-7937-5782 , Komlaga, Gregory Afra, Chapuis, Arnaud and Müller, Joachim (2020) Comparative study between current practices on cassava drying by small-size enterprises in Africa. Applied Sciences, 10 (21):7863. pp. 1-17. ISSN 2076-3417 (Online) (doi:https://doi.org/10.3390/app10217863)

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Abstract

Small-size enterprises drying cassava in Africa mostly use fixed-bed dryers or pneumatic dryers. The objective of this study was to determine which of those two dryers is the best choice for this operation. Energy performance, product quality and costs were measured and analysed using a comparative experiment design. Each dryer was considered as a treatment and experiments were performed in quintuplicate at a cassava processing small-size enterprise in Ghana. The energy performance of the pneumatic dryer was superior because of the better contact between the cassava grits and the drying air, resulting in greater heat and mass transfer. The cassava flour obtained from the fixed-bed dryer had a higher Whiteness Index, but the same level of lightness, and the staff responsible for managing product quality was not able to visually distinguish them. As a result of the pneumatic dryer’s better energy performance, its operating cost was lower. The capital cost of this dryer was higher, but to recover the additional investment only 194 days of operation were needed. Therefore, it was concluded that pneumatic dryers are a better choice of equipment for cassava drying by small-size enterprises in Africa.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Uncontrolled Keywords:	convection dryer; pneumatic dryer; flash dryer; fixed-bed dryer; flatbed dryer; energy efficiency; product quality; costs
Subjects:	S Agriculture > S Agriculture (General)
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Engineering & Science Faculty of Engineering & Science > Natural Resources Institute Faculty of Engineering & Science > Natural Resources Institute > Food & Markets Department
Related URLs:	Publisher
Last Modified:	06 Nov 2020 22:38
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/30108

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