Investigation of Energy Performance of Heat Pump System in Drying of Mushroom Slices

The sliced culture fungus (Agaricus bisporus) at different thicknesses was dried at a drying chamber temperature of 40 oC using a fully closed cycle heat pump dryer (IPK). During the drying system operation, the amount of heat supplied to the drying air by the condenser and the amount of heat drawn from the drying air by the evaporator were found in each minute period and the average performance coefficient (ITKsis) of the IPK system was calculated. Experiments, drying speed of 1 m/s without any pretreatment. At the end of the experiments, the sliced cultured fungi which had a water content varying between 8.234 g-water / g-dry matter water to 0.932 g-water / g-dry matter water and the slurry thicknesses of 4, 6 and 8 mm were dried at 305, 355 and 415 minutes, respectively. Also, average condense capacity (Qcon) and evaporation capacity (Qevap) were determined as 2.350 and 1.610, respectively. The value of maximum average heat pump performance coefficient value was calculated as 3.157 for all system