A SCOTTISH company has designed, manufactured and installed the little and large of the grain drying world.

Huntly-based Graintek had its largest ever installation up and running for last harvest and is also pushing sales of what is probably the UK's and maybe even the world's smallest portable grain dryer with a two-tonne capacity.

Graintek's managing director, Kenny Addison, told The SF: "For last harvest we designed and manufactured our largest grain dryer yet – a 200-tonne model installed in Tayside, making it one of the largest single unit dryers in Europe.

"It is fully insulated and clad with profiled plastic-coated sheet steel with a colour to blend in with the surroundings and being fully insulated to reduce heat loss, condensation and give high fuel efficiency to meet demands of farmers, co-ops and maltsters.

"They purchased Graintek dryers so as to reduce their own carbon footprint and their fuel bills. Along with our automatic moisture controller, there is an excellent degree of precision of drying temperature and output moisture," he said.

Pneumatically operated cooling doors automatically adjust to ambient temperature conditions so that the dryer runs at maximum efficiency in terms of the ratio of drying to cooling.

The fans are inverter controlled, enabling fan speed to be adjusted for lighter crops. "We also perfected a full split column design. Although it is a single unit construction the dryer can be operated as two individual columns," said Mr Addison.

"In the event that the operator has smaller volumes of grain for the day he can still dry using one half of the dryer. The cladding and weather roof, which prevents the ingress of water to the filling equipment on top of the dryer, will also prolong the life of the dryer."

This dryer has two intake trenches, each holding 300 tonnes and capable of drying each day 45 trailer loads of malting barley ranging from 21-17 % down to 12.5% per day without the need for a nightshift with hot air temperature of 50-56° C.

"We achieved an average fuel consumption of six litres of fuel per tonne as opposed to a partially insulated dryer on the same site averaging 10 litres per tonne for the same product probably making our dryer the greenest on the market.

"We prefer to keep the output speed of dryer constant and control heat by increasing or decreasing automatically with our digitally controlled burners depending on variations of moistures entering the dryer.

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"This, along with our state-of-the-art plc and computer system, make it one of the most advanced dryers out there. We were pioneers of this system and our competitors scoffed – but now they are now trying to follow suit with varying degrees of success.

Pictured is the dryer, all suited and booted and with its fully automatic 70-motor control centre, including store ventilation control tailored to customers’ requirements.

The 'baby' portable two-tonne grain dryer can dry by using continuous or batch mode with the flick of a switch. What makes it unique is that fan, burner, elevator, top and bottom screw conveyors can run from a 13A single phase domestic plug by using a plc, inverter and fuzzy logic all designed by Graintek. It won a second Royal Highland Show silver medal for the company.

"Another unique design is the use of a single leg elevator running continuously to fill and dry at the same time without the need of second elevator, for which we received the Maurice Memorial Trophy in 2012 for the best out of 71 entries in the Lamma innovation awards for our bigger dryers up to 15-tonnes per hour, winning ahead of Massey-Ferguson in second place," said Mr Addison.

"On its first outing it had a real baptism of fire drying hemp seed at 28-30 % moisture down to 8% with a drying temperature of only 47°C – in this case we had dryer in batch mode because of the high moisture content.

"We designed this for the smaller farms that don’t have a big acreage and no three phase power. Being fully transportable it can also be shared with neighbours.

"We are Scotland’s only grain dryer manufacturer and along with great bunch of dedicated employees we are always working hard to improve and come up with new designs of our products to keep ahead of the field which has paid off by winning three Royal Highland and six Lamma awards for Innovation."

Graintek is also doing tis bit for the UK's export trade, having sold 16 dryers to Estonia.