Blueprint: Village Seed-Saving Station (Solar Tunnel Dryer and Desiccant-Bead Store) — Build Specification
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: DESIGN BLUEPRINT — SIMULATED, NOT MEASURED — NOT BUILT. A complete build specification for a village seed-saving station, derived from the source paper: William Alexander Aldred, 'A Combined Solar Tunnel Dryer and Desiccant-Bead Store for Village Seed Saving: Design, Budgets, and Failure Floor', DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.24108832. The station processes seed in one-tonne batches: a 24 m2 solar tunnel dryer, with seed temperature held at or below 40 degC and a thermostat vent opening at 38 degC, dries seed from 20% to 12% moisture (wet basis), removing 90.9 kg of water with 236.4 MJ in 1.56 days at a design insolation of 5.0 kWh/m2/day; desiccant beads in five sealed drums then finish the drying from 12% to 9%, using 198.6 kg of regenerable beads per tonne (39.7 kg per drum), hold the seed through a 180-day storage span against 1.8 kg of ingress, and are regenerated at 160 degC with 145.3 MJ over 2.24 days on an 8 m2 solar regenerator. Total collector area is 32.0 m2. The blueprint gives dimensions and reference geometry, a bill of materials, an assembly sequence, the full operating cycle, tolerances and acceptance checks, failure modes, and maintenance. The operating envelope is stated at full size: the station fails below an insolation floor of 3.74 kWh/m2/day, and at a wet-season insolation of 2.2 kWh/m2/day tunnel drying takes 3.55 days against a 2.5-day safe window. Nothing has been built or measured; every derived quantity is reproducible from the accompanying compute.py and results.json.
Author: Aldred, William Alexander
Language: English
Topic: Food Drying and Modeling
Subfield: Food Science
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225760345
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