De Jesús Díaz, Luis A.

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    Design and manufacture of a linear fresnel reflector prototype for coffee drying applications in Puerto Rico
    (2014) De Jesús Díaz, Luis A.; Irizarry Rivera, Agustín A.; College of Engineering; Rodríguez, Francisco; Serrano, David; Department of Mechanical Engineering; Marín, Carlos
    The need and desire to use renewable, sustainable, and efficient energy have led to increased research in this field as the long term consequences of not doing so will affect the environment. As an alternative to drying particulate materials using gas and electricity we decided to design, manufacture, and evaluate the performance characteristics of two air collectors for a Linear Fresnel Reflector (LFR) prototype, intended to dry ripe coffee beans to a desired temperature of 50 oC. A steady-state thermal network analysis and computational modeling techniques were conducted to predict the thermal performance of the desired collectors. They were manufactured and assembled along with the optical frame of the prototype in order to carry out the required experiments to test the system. The thermal network analysis and that of the computation modeling for one of the designs agreed with one another. The second design was then analyzed by computational model and showed a better performance than the first collector. The experiments showed that both collectors reached the desired air temperature at the outlet with the second collector outperforming the first design demonstrating that the LFR might be a viable system to dry coffee beans.