Development of Drying Uniformity for Round Hay Bales Dryer = Development of Drying Uniformity for Round Hay Bales Dryer

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In Taiwan, most of the farmer dry hay by natural seasoning. Recent data have shown that moisture content should be 18 % or less in round hay bales for safe storage. If moisture content is too high, the hay will be putrefaction. However, it’s hard for the farmer to harvest on time due to raining season in Taiwan and it would drop hay quality as well. Therefore, it’s important to develop a hay dryer to improve the hay quality. The objective of this research was to modify the round bale hay dryer which had been developed by the Department of Bio-Industrial Mechatronics Engineering of National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan. The moisture content of the round bale could be dried below 18 % by the prototype but its drying efficiency is not sufficient, only 5.6 kg/hr. Therefore, the hay bale was sealed using a heavy fabric to prevent the drying air leaking. The drying-finished hay bales were sampled on three parts, upper, medium and lower layers, respectively. The results show that the innovative device can increase the drying efficiency up to 13.2 kg/hr. For the drying uniformity, the moisture content on the external and internal parts of upper and medium layers were significantly different from central parts’, without sealing. Its standard deviation is 8.02. With sealing, the whole hay bales’ moisture content could reach the goal for storage, and its standard deviation is 1.39. The results show that the new sealing approach can increase the drying uniformity significantly. However, sealing a bale manually takes 10 minutes with two workers. It’s time-consuming. Thus, one mechanism for sealing was designed, and one person could finish the sealing work in a minute.