Efficient Fluidized Bed Drying of High Quality Seeds

Project: PhD

Project Details

Description

High quality seeds are the starting point for successful agricultural plant production and have major impact on the sustainability of our food production system. Vegetable production is an important industry, facilitating the trend towards more vegetarian and healthy diets. For the Netherlands, being worldwide the biggest vegetable seed exporting country, vegetable seeds are of huge economic importance. Seed breeding companies are challenged by producing high quality seeds for farmers and keeping the quality of different batches constant to assure healthy plants and high yields. Therefore, throughout the seed production process, many dedicated treatments and drying steps are applied. While priming treatments are well investigated, drying treatments have not yet been intensively studied. In particular, the specific effects of drying on seed properties, storability and germination, as well as optimal drying routes for different input batches, are largely unknown. Therefore, in this project seed drying will be investigated and modelled to understand its influence on physical parameters and seed quality and models will be employed to optimise drying regarding quality and efficiency. First, this research will focus on a single seed level of simple and complex shaped seeds before investigating bulk seeds in fluid bed drying. For validation of the model different small-scale dryers will be used in combination with in-line measurements. Physical characteristics will be taken as a constraint regarding quality including germination speed and usable plants. In drying studies optimal seed quality will be investigated and empirically modelled. Finally, the efficiency of fluid bed dryers will be analysed and optimal drying conditions regarding high quality and high efficiency determined.
StatusActive
Effective start/end date1/04/21 → …

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