Solar Drying in Indonesia and its Development: A Review and Implementation
The immense food demand in Indonesia can no longer be satisfied by the current agricultural and plantation process. Both sectors need a more effective and productive solution to produce more food while also maintaining the quality. Yet, most of the farmers work in remote and rural areas where technology is an uncommon thing. Indonesia’s agricultural and plantation sectors are urgently in need of technological support to upgrade the processes, specifically for lower-to-middle class farmers. Emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligent (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) need to be adopted to system dynamics in agricultural processing, specifically drying stage. The drying model system that adopts the greenhouse concept, such as the solar dryer dome, is one of the promising drying methods. Implementation of industry 4.0 technology can optimize the solar dryer dome through several activities such as IoT that can track and organize the dryer data remotely or ML/AI that can automatically predict and control the dryer environment. This is proven by our smart solar dryer functionality and capability to support the agricultural drying process by utilizing IoT-enabled connection and AI/ML system. In this study, we review the development of solar dryer in Indonesia and provide the results from our smart solar dryer to optimize and encourage the development Indonesia’s agricultural industry which potentially improve post-harvest product quantity and quality.
Authors:
Nico Hananda, Azure Kamul, Christian Harito, Endang Djuana, Gregorius Natanael Elwirehardja, Bens Pardamean, Fergyanto Efendy Gunawan, Arief Suriadi Budiman, Muhammad Asrol, and Timotius Pasang
6th International Conference on Eco Engineering Development 2022, ICEED 2022