Adoption of Integrated Solar System with Thermic fluid working medium for Parboiling Rice Mills in Tamilnadu

Abstract

Tamilnadu is having more than 3000 rice processing or manufacturing units popularly known as Rice Mills. The typical Rice Mills are energy intensive and huge quantity of waste generation sector especially in sorting contaminants, parboiling process and husk removal. The two major process in the boiled rice manufacturing industry are Parboiling and Drying of paddy, in which steam is used as the thermal energy source through rice husk/firewood boilers having SEC_(t) of 195- 280 kg/ton of paddy. Therefore Parboiled rice processing is considered to be water and energy intensive and therefore affects the environment significantly. The thermal energy consumption for par-boiled rice process is 2800- 3800MJ/ton paddy, of which 20-30% is for Parboiling process and steaming process and 60 -70% for paddy drying process. Several attempts were made already to adopt solar system as an alternative source of thermal energy which has been trailed for hot water and hot air generation separately. These approaches had resulted in increase in high investment with very low rate of return and resulted as a non attractive in economic terms. Hence, this study has been focused on study of thermal energy requirement of the above processes of rice mill and to check the viability of adoption of an integrated solar thermal system with thermic fluid as working medium. The expected outcomes of this study will be reduction of SEC_(t) to be less than 100 kg/ton of paddy to null value and also to make carbon neutral.