The purpose of this research is to develop a hot air dryer using waste heat from a200 liter kiln for drying bananas and to investigate its drying performance. The main parts of the dryer consist of the drying chamber that has dimensions 0.71x0.83x.091 m3 the air circulation system and a heat exchanger which receives waste heat from the exhaust tube and kiln surface. The dryer was developed by designing a drying chamber on the top of a 200 liter kiln to reduce heat lost in the structure and an exhaust gas heat exchanger was developed using groups of copper tubes for increasing then heat transferred to the air. The drying performances were analyzed by measuring specific drying rates and specific energy consumption. Experiments were performed under different temperatures of 60 70 and 80℃ And at a constant velocity of 1.8 ms-1. Eucalyptus was selected as the heat source. Thirty kg of peeled bananas were prepared at an initial moisture content of 241.19±31.50% dry basis and were dried until to final moisture content of 48.47±10.46% dry basis. All experiments were carried out in duplicate. For temperatures of 60 70 and 80 ℃ the ave age specific drying rates were 0.085±0.0004 0.114±0.0009 and 0.1277±0.010 kg water h-1kesolid-1 and the average specific energy consumptions were 1.42±0.055 1.21±0.355 and 1.04±0.074 MJ/kg water respectively. Some dried bananas had burned at a temperature of 80℃ so at temperature of 70 ℃ was the optimal condition in this experiment. This produced good color a high specific drying rate and low specific energy consumption.

This research aims to develop the waste heat energy conversion device to generate electricity through a thermoelectric generator (TEG) which is called “CHEU. This device is applied to the LPG cookstove that serves as a waste heat source. The thermoelectric generator with 4 modules in series connection is used to convert heat energy to electricity. The present research shows a modification of the CHEU based on two concepts as follows: (1) re-design the structure for heat transfer improvement and (2) select the high capability of TEG to support a high temperature from a heat source as a result of (1). In this study the modified CHEU is called “MCHEU”. A heat-load condition is set as the gas pressure of LPG which varies in a range of 0.1 - 0.6 kg/cm2 and the throttle valve is fixed approximately at 40% of a fully opened throttle while the air entrainment is fully opened throttle. Also the water-cooling system is used for heat dissipation. Base on the performance evaluation of MCHEU the interesting results are drawn as follows: 1) the maximum temperature difference is on an average value of 278.5oC at a maximum heat load condition while a maximum voltage current and power are on an average value of 18.83 V 5.67 A and 107 W respectively. 2) The temperature difference of MCHEU is higher than that of CHEU with an average value of 50%. 3) The output power obtained by MCHEU is higher than that of CHEU with an average value of 52% and takes less time about 40% for fully charging a battery (12V 7.5Ah). Nevertheless MCHEU usage does not affect the thermal efficiency of a cookstove. 4) The efficiency of an energy conversion obtained by MCHEU is 20% which is higher than that of CHEU about 2%.