| Abstrak/Abstract |
Indonesia as tropical country has climate characteristics that significantly correlated with agricultural system, in term of productivity and product quality. One of the problem examples that should be considered i.e. farmers have difficulty to find or use a good quality of seed for cultivating the specified horticulture plant.
To overcome these problems, it has been designed a hybrid dryer that utilize biofuel as main dryer energy source that generated by using gasify system and combining with sun drying in a certain condition. Hybrid system means that when the dryer operated in a day time or during dry season, the system utilized solar energy as a principle of greenhouse effect. When in the bad weather, the dryer operated by utilizing gasify system as its energy source.
The important parameter that should be controlled and maintained in hybrid dryer to assure the quality of drying materials is air temperature of drying. There are three treatments that conducted for comparing and finding the optimum output of drying process, i.e. (i) hybrid drying, (ii) greenhouse effect based drying system, and (iii) sun drying as conventional method. In the first experiment, a designed dryer was tested to dry papaya seeds and sugar beet. Variables observed were seed temperature, air temperature, germination rate and total germination. The result showed that the highest germination was obtained by using hybrid dryer which without heating from gasifier (greenhouse effect). The level of seed viability ranged from 92% to 99%. The result will be different if the experiment is conducted in rainy season
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