Abstract
Korean farmers have purchased agricultural dryer and low temperature storage system apart. In this study, the system was designed and constructed to investigate the practical application possibility of the air to air heat pump as drying and low temperature storage system for agricultural products with providing basic data. The performance and drying characteristics of the system evaluated by drying red pepper. The value of coefficient of performance of the system for heating was from 1.8 to 2.2 when ambient air temperature varied from 13$^{\circ}C$ to 23$^{\circ}C$. For operating the heat pump as dryer for drying red pepper by setting three drying air temperature of 50, 55 and 60$^{\circ}C$, specific moisture extraction rates meaning amount of energy consumption for removing moisture of 1kg from red pepper were 1.095, 1.017 and 1.094 kg$_{water}$/kWh, respectively. The drying period up to moisture ratio of 0.02 were 31, 26 and 21 hour, respectively. The lightness, redness, yellowness and chroma differences of red pepper dried by the heat pump dryer were lowered than those of red pepper dried by conventional heated air dryer except for yellowness difference at drying air temperature of 60$^{\circ}C$.
