Scrumptious Dried Bananas

At last! Smoke-free dried bananas, dried using biomass as a fuel. It took just under 30 hours to dry the bananas using 10 kilograms of wood. As this was an experiment, I recorded the weight of the bananas as they dried to determine the drying rate of the bananas.

Testing – It was great to here that many people liked the bananas, especially their colour and sweetness. When asking a couple of students at the hostel if they liked the bananas, they gave a response which even after 8 weeks, I find very confusing – the Indian head wobble!

The next steps of this project are to test the dryer at various sites around Karnataka.

Over the weekend myself, Sam and some of the students rented a Jeep to take up to Charmaddi, stopping off at various viewpoints and waterfalls along the way. On Sunday we had a relaxing day at the beach – and it didn't rain.

Mysore

Distance from Ujire: 240km

Outward Travelling Time: 6 hours (overnight bus)

Return Travelling Time: 12 hours (2 trains and a bus)

Sights Visited:

Mysore Palace

Charmundi Hill & Temple
The Market

Train Journey back to Ujire
The Railway Museum

Mysore Zoo

The National Institute of Engineering (NIE) & the Centre for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technologies

This trip was fantastic, and we managed to pack so much stuff into our 2 days spent there.

More pictures here

Failure

This week I have developed a cheap, sixteen brick rocket stove which can be used in combination with the dryer, giving good combustion once lit and good temperatures.

This however was the only success. The metalwork in the dryer restricts the flow of smoke through the dryer, causing the food to become smokey, a problem which I have been as yet unable to get around. It is difficult to get good heat exchange, good air flow and a simple design.

I visited a steel workshop today, searching for alternative materials for the dryer. It was amazing to see the complete lack of health and safety procedures, with people arc welding in flip flops and without a face mask... but nobody was hurt while I was there.

Good luck to anyone in the UK who will collect their A-level results tomorrow!

Indian independence day

Yesterday was the day that India celebrates it's independence from the British, so myself and Sam thought the best thing for us to do was go join in with the flag raising ceremony at 8.15 in the morning!

Later, I joined some of the students at the college who had hired a jeep to go to the nearby Didupe falls. Eleven of us all piled into the jeep and were driven along the bumpy road and track as far as we could go. The group walked the last two kilometers. A single track path led up to the base of the falls, but at some points this path became part of the stream, forcing us to wade up through the stream.

Unlike Jog falls, you could get right up close to the bottom of the falls and feel the force of the water and wind pounding against your body, crashing down from above. It was a beautiful spot and well worth the slightly slippy walk up the path to get to it.

Now that the concept of the biomass dryer works, I will be spending much of my time trying to get several made, further reducing the smoke, and trying to reduce the costs by better materials selection. I should be able to run product demo's at some of the SELCO branches to demonstrate the concept and receive feedback for further developments.

Anands Farm and Sam's Arrival

,This week I was finally able to collect the Heat Exchanger I'd had designed. On Tuesday I bought the glass for the solar collector and packaged the dryer securely in cardboard boxes.

Sam, the other EWB placement volunteer arrived on Wednesday morning at 5.45am. I went to meet him at the bus stop, but we somehow managed to miss each other, only to meet up half an hour later after I had walked to the town and back.

In the afternoon, we packaged the dryer into the back of Anand's (the managers) jeep and drove to his farm. His farm was a half hour drive along tarmacked roads. 4-wheel drive was needed for the last 20 minutes of the journey, up a steep bumpy track leading to his farm. The farmhouse had fantastic views across to the steep, waterfall covered western ghats on the opposite side of the valley. The fields were terraced into the hill, with rice paddy, ginger, onions and coconuts being some of the main crops grown on the land.

The dryer was built by two of the local farm workers following the instructions I had given them. They had a few problems identifying which piece fitted where, but an hour and a half later they had constructed the dryer – a successful result, proving that the design was sound and my instructions were clear.

Yesterday, went to his farm by bus, walking the last part of the journey up the track. The two local farm workers helped light a fire underneath the dryer, and prepared several trays of coconuts to dry. At first a simple fire was built, which proved to be far too smokey, and quickly smoked most of the coconuts in the dryer. A better, more contained stove was built which gave a much improved result with most of the smoke going out the chimney.

Jog Falls

Over the weekend I visited Jog Falls, the highest waterfalls in India with 4 others from the hostel. The falls were about 300km away, and we took 9 separate buses to get there and back again; a total of about 16 hours spent on bumpy, potholed Indian roads.

We left at noon Saturday and stayed at a lodge in a town overnight, costing 80rs (£1.20) each! The falls were well worth all the traveling for. A viewpoint on one side of the valley overlooked the falls. There were 4 main waterfalls, but in every other corner of the valley smaller waterfalls could be seen. The weather was typical, bright sunshine one minute and heavy rain the next, forcing all the umbrellas to come out.

The steps to the bottom of the falls was closed, but we went to the top of the falls instead, where hoards of people stepped across the slippy rocks to get a closer look at the waterfalls. We traveled back a different, and much more comfortable route, taking only 3 buses, including a night bus, arriving back in Ujire at 4.10 this morning.

Indian Time

In my last post, I said I would have successfully dried smoke-free bananas. This is not the case!

The aluminum workshop rather reluctantly agreed to make my design of heat exchanger on Monday. By Tuesday they phoned requiring clarification on the design. I am still waiting for a phone call to let me know that it is ready to be collected.

On Monday, I also sent a sheet of plywood to be cut out to make the dryer. Unfortunately, the carpenter struggled to read the dimensions on the print out, and as such, when I returned yesterday he had not measured or cut out anything. I spent a good hour yesterday afternoon standing next to him telling him where to put the tape measure.

At this prototyping stage, these problems are not a major concern, but they do delay the project. I suppose I've just got to appreciate that the designs are not conventional, and work done according to Indian time, and not as fast as at home.

This weekend I'm looking forward to visiting Jog Falls – the highest waterfalls in India, which should be a spectacular sight during the monsoon.

House Hopping

On Sunday, I went with two other SELCO interns to a really rural area, in order to interview a number of different farmers about their lives in order to help deliver technology which meets the needs of the customers. The landscape & views of the Western Ghats was stunning!

We were trying to get their thoughts on two products, the solar dryer, and a mobile phone service that would send up to date market prices for produce, preventing them from being ripped off by middle-men. All of the households were very welcoming, and were keen to greet us with snacks and tea. After visiting a few houses I felt very full!

The mobile phone service was perceived as a good idea by most farmers, however the the capacity of the dryer was often too small for their use. A possible future project will be to make a dryer with a capacity of 50 - 100kg rather than 5kg. It was difficult discussing drying when everything around is damp from the monsoon rains. Being able to dry products in the monsoon was definitely perceived as a benefit.

The most incredible experience I had, was staying the night at one of the farmers houses, a friend of one of the local interns. They made us feel so welcome in their house (4 rooms) and fed us a non veg feast. Fish at 5pm, and chicken for dinner at 11. They kept 4 cows, a dozen chickens and owned just over an acre of land, which they grew coconuts, areca, and bananas. Their family lived a very happy, subsistence lifestyle; but a lifestyle which leaves them very vulnerable to outside influences like market price fluctuations and climate change. Only when I woke up, to the sound of a cockerel, did I really appreciate how rural their house was – I had to walk through 2 streams to get to their house.

I've designed a new smoke-proof heat collector and sent the design to be constructed. By Thursday I hope to have dried smoke-free bananas.