DRY F
In this months Milling and Grain
#1 SATAKE
PIONEERING TEMPERING DRYER
S
by Kazutaka Ikeda, International Business Division, Satake Corporation, Japan
atake’s history for the development of the tempering grain dryer began in the 1960’s. After building Japan’s first country elevator (CE) with LSU type dryers in 1964, Satake started installing its new type dryer SDRSpeed Dryer, in its CEs. The new dryer repeated the process of heating up the paddy for six minutes and holding it for two hours in a separate bin to evenly distribute the moisture contents (MC) between the husk and the brown rice inside, a process referred to as “tempering”, to slowly bring the MC down for safer storage. A single heating and tempering cycle reduced the MC by approximately two percent. Besides contributing to the yield by reducing the broken rice caused by rapid drying, the tempering drying method was also able to reduce the size of the equipment. It needed only 1/20th the size of drying section compared to previous continuous dryers. The tempering drying method became the standard for paddy drying since that period. In 1966, Satake introduced a smaller size dryer, the MDR series, for farmers. It had both drying and tempering sections in a single unit. Paddy moved through a drying section receiving heated air at approximately 40-60°C for few minutes then transferred to a tempering section above by a bucket elevator. It was held here for approximately one hour to equilibrate the MC between husk and brown rice before then being moved through the drying section again. Repeating this cycle multiple times, the MC dropped by 0.5 percent every one hour. This signaled the introduction of both the first “tempering dryer” and “recirculating dryer”. Since then, Satake’s tempering dryer has continuously made advances in its functionality, introducing such features as a standard moisture meter controlled drying time, and an automatic shut off burner function once the desired moisture level is achieved. When I joined as a sales person in 1997, Satake had
46 | August 2019 - Milling and Grain