Özet:

Hazelnut is the most important agricultural product of the Eastern Black Sea region of Turkey, and is exported to the world market dried and unshelled. The traditional sun drying process used by hazelnut farmers takes about 3 to 10 days depending on the weather conditions. If precipitation is high during the harvesting period, drying takes longer and causes the harvest to be spoilt. Although Turkey grows almost 75% of the world's hazelnuts, due to the current difficulties in the drying process, the country has problems in reaching world standards. Therefore, instead of using traditional methods, artificial drying processes should be used to obtain optimum drying conditions and to avoid defects in the product. In this study, for application to the regional agricultural and marine products such as hazelnut, tobacco, fish, corn, fruit and vegetables, low cost, multipurpose solar dryers were designed. Properties of three different designs (cabinet, cupboard, and tent types) are given. In these systems, drying curves were given for hazelnuts, which were harvested, peeled and dried. The present results were compared with results from traditional methods. Although hazelnuts are dried in 82 hours in traditional methods, in the cabinet dryer with a pre-heater the drying took about 28 hours. In the cabinet dryer with only solar energy the drying took about 50 hours, in the tent-type dryer the drying took about 73 hours, in the cupboard type dryer between 72 and 76 hours. Samples of dried hazelnut were subjected to taste analyses and it was observed that the quality of these products was not affected inversely in any way.

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