Design and Development of a Dryer with Herb Grinder Controlled by a Microcontroller System
Keywords:
drying, hot air, AC motor, microcontroller, herb grindingAbstract
The sufficiency economy philosophy has been adopted by many communities to play essential roles in more community-based activities. A policy has been formulated by the Ministry of Public Health to encourage medical institutions to use therapeutic drugs along with modern medicines. For these reasons, many communities have realized they need to grow more herbs that can be processed in order to generate income for the locals. Processing certain herbs can improve their properties and increase their quality of access to healing and the alleviation of disease. Therefore, a dryer was developed to study the factors of using a microcontroller to control the same motor both to create the movement of the herbs during drying and to control the speed of the high-powered motor to grind them together, as well as to control the temperature appropriately. The movement of the herbs to remove moisture by controlling the temperature would result in a high drying rate and a shorter drying time due to evaporation. If herbs have high humidity, it will result in damage to their quality. The experimental results showed that moving the herbs would cause the distribution of humidity at the drying temperature of 40–70 °C. Compared with the time of drying and grinding by machine and normal drying and grinding, the time can be reduced according to the type of medicinal plant. The efficiency improvement test using lean techniques comparing the difference before and after fabrication can reduce the process time by at least 10.98 percent, depending on the single-phase AC motor control temperature setting. Humidification can be distributed while grinding, and the energy loss was lower than adding a hot air-generating unit. In experiments with two types of herbs, it was concluded that the levels of satisfaction with general appearance, color, odor, taste, and solubility were averaged very well in all factors for both types of herbs. The use of a motor to drive the herbs caused better heat diffusion than static heating and could adjust the temperature requirements according to the characteristics of the herbs.
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