Demonstration of Biomass based dryer for Agarbathi (incense) sticks

Cycle brand agarbathi is a premium brand with 15% of market share in Indian agarbathi industry, is a product of N Rangarao and Sons (NRS). They have manufacturing centres in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh and out side India as well. They produce agarbathi & mix perfumes in there own unit. They also have R&D centre with professionally qualified people to innovate new types of products. The company has facility more than 5,00,000 sft of floor space and producing more than 4 billion sticks a year. They are producing 500 different ranges of fragrances. Drying of raw or wet agarabathi is one of the major concerns in the industry. Presently drying is carried in open space. Drying requires about 4 hours in summer and 8 hours during winter or rainy season. Sun drying is not a feasible practice, as it reduces the quality of product due to mixing of moisture and other air/dust contaminations. Apart from this industry is getting 10% raw material wastage of its overall production. NRS has identified several issues and invited TERI to develop and demonstrate an agarabathi dryer, which could utilise waste agarbathi sticks as fuel to generate heat. It was decided to demonstrate a dryer with capacity of 100 kg (wet) per batch in the premises of NRS.