Bright ideas for copra
p. 51 · Read in the full issue
drying on Niue
Niue has hit upon an in genious scheme for drying its copra with great savings in fuel and manpower, both at a premium on the island.
For about a year now, it has been using the waste heat from its diesel-fired powerhouse at Tuila to dry the green copra, considerably simplifying the whole copra-cutting process and inducing more people to tackle the task.
With about a third of the energy from the 200 kW generators thrown out of the radiators as waste energy, the Niue Development Board started viewing the powerhouse as a giant heater and experimented in harness ing it.
The result was the board built a tunnel-like shelter over the radiator fan with one side of the tunnel consisting of a row of doors through which oven trays, measuring about 1 m by 2 m can be pushed. The green copra is collected from the villages and loaded on the trays for drying, cutting out the laborious task of keeping a furnace stoked for about two days to dry the copra in the village.
Nearly half of Niue’s copra
crop, about two to three ton nes a week, is now dried by the powerhouse in this way and, with the benefit of this being rotated around the is land, everyone has a turn to use the free drying service about every three weeks.
As well as the obvious sav ing in fuel, a great advantage of the scheme is the saving in manpower, which is in con siderable short supply on the island. It has even resulted in an increase in copra pro duction, along with the rise in copra prices, as some people, who could previously find no time for cutting and drying copra, are now cutting it for the powerhouse processing.
Although well satisfied with the scheme so far, the NDB is keen to further increase its efficiency and has enlisted the help of the New Zealand Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, which is to do a feasibility study on building a bulk bin drier around the waste heat. This would mean further savings in labour as the copra could be loaded and unloaded at the drier directly from a truck in stead of on to the series of oven trays as at present.
A Niue islander cutting copra.