Study of the efficiency of drying grass seeds for forage crops on a rotary dryer

Federal Scientific Agroengineering Center VIM, branch in Saint Petersburg, Saint Petersburg, Russia

^* Corresponding author: smelik_va@mail.ru

Abstract

In many countries of the world with high climate humidity, grass seeds after their harvesting cannot be preserved without artificial drying. The artificial drying process is associated with high energy costs, and its regimes should not reduce the sowing quality of seeds. Therefore, it is of particular importance to determine the most suitable drying regimes for seeds. For this purpose, for the conditions of seed farms in the North-West of the Russian Federation, experimental studies were performed to obtain information on the parameters and modes of drying seeds of perennial grasses for their various initial states and conditions. Experimental studies were performed on a rotary dryer during the drying of meadow fescue seeds. The experimental data were analyzed in Microsoft Excel 2010 using the methods of mathematical statistics. The obtained mathematical dependencies made it possible to establish that the effective modes of drying the seeds of the studied culture are provided during their layer-by-layer unloading from the drying chamber. Moreover, the lower layer of seeds should be unloaded every 2.5 hours of drying, while adding to the upper layer of the drying chamber a new volume of seeds equal to the unloaded one.