Prototype Of Tray Dryer Unit For Silica Gel Drying Based On Bagasse

Tray dryer is one type of plate-shaped dryer, which is often used to dry materials in the form of solid or paste, therefore the tool is very suitable for drying or converting hydrogel to silica. The working principle of the dryer is to transfer heat around the environment of the material to be dried by means of heat transfer by convection and conduction. Weight reduction due to water loss due to evaporation when drying process is done. In this research, the silica to be dried was made from bagasse using a number of additional ingredients namely hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide with various variations. Tool performance is determined based on the amount of thermal efficiency obtained where thermal efficiency is a percentage of the amount of heat flowing during the drying process. In addition, the rate and time of drying will also affect the quality of the product. research steps include; tool design using the functional approach method to find out the functions of the unit of equipment used and structural approach to get the dimensions of the tool Silica gel produced from the drying process is analyzed using X-Ray Difraction (XRD) and Fourier Transform Infra Red (FTIR) which aims to characterize the crystal structure and detect functional groups. Based on the analysis results obtained silica gel has a functional group of Si-OH and amorphous crystal structure, so it is categorized as meeting the standards of JIS-0701. Calculation results obtained optimal conditions achieved at the time and speed of drying 360 minutes, 0.019 kg / hour m2 with a silica gel moisture content of 0.81% and thermal efficiency of 86.4%.