Abstract:

Due to poor sensory and hygienic quality of traditional dried-apricots in Xinjiang, a small-size solar-drying device (SD) with a greenhouse-like chamber that could exploit local abundant solar energy resource had been developed. Results indicated that SD had an excellent temperature-rising effect, which exhibited 13 ℃ of average temperature-rising effect and 8.3 ℃ of temperature-rising effect even in lower level of greenhouse chamber compared with the environment temperature. This solar-drying device had no limitations to weather conditions and also could provide a moisture-proofing function at night. The relative yield of apricot using this SD device was 5.19 kg/m2, which revealed 2.08 folds higher than the natural air-drying method. Therefore, SD technology can provide high-quality dried apricots due to its high efficiency. In order to obtain high-quality dried apricots, the optimal SD operation processes were investigated in this work.

Key words: dried apricot, solar-drying device, high-quality