Design of tobacco-curing system using biomass gas as energy and evaluation of its energy efficiency and quality improvement of tobacco products

In order to improve the heat efficiency of the traditional tobacco-curing chamber and raise the tobacco quality cured, a new tobacco-curing system was studied. It makes advances in two aspects: the first one is using biomass gas as a substitute for fossil fuel; the second one is changing the traditional direct heat exchanging mode into combination one which consists of direct and indirect heat exchanging. There are two advantages of the improvements, the first one is that the heat can be utilized more efficiently, the second one is that the quality of the tobacco can be raised because the CO₂ concentration in the drying gas is lower than 1.35% carried by the flue gas. Experimental results that the heat efficiency of the new system can reach 58.3%, and the quality of the cured tobacco can be upgraded compared to that with traditional curing process, as well, the curing time is 15 hours shorter than that of the traditional one.