Improving Working Capacity, Quality While Reducing Energy Consumption During Corn Drying Process

The natural air/low temperature (NA/LT) in-bin drying technology is not adopted in Italy and Europe. The lack of information and successful examples prevent the diffusion and adoption of this technology by farmers. In the last years, an in-bin drying prototype was developed by the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) in agreement with four companies in order to investigate the applications of this technology in Argentina. The core of the drying system is a model based fan and burner controller. The system was adapted by DISAFA to be used in Italian conditions and installed in two plant of capacity of 70 and 100 t in NW of Italy to dry corn. The goals of this research were: 1) test the reliability of automatic smart drying controller for low-temperature drying, 2) test the performance of a prototype in-bin drying system for drying corn to 14% final MC, 3) evaluate the energy consumption and 4) evaluate grain quality after drying. The results showed that the in-bin drying system was able to dry the grain in about 28 days from 21.5% to 13,7% MC. The individual kernel MC gradient was reduced during drying. The energy consumption was very low compared to traditional mixed flow driers, just about 4.95 L t-1 of dried grain. The long drying time was due to the airflow which was just 1.5 m3 min-1t-1 instead of the requested by design of the plant that is of 2 m3 min-1t-1 of grain. Grain quality was very good with very low stress crack index compared to traditional driers. The very low breakage of kernels during drying with very low air speed imply no detectable dust emission from the plant. These results confirmed the potential of NA/LT in-bin drying systems for drying corn, rice and other special quality grains in NW of Italy.