A corn dryer prototype was manufactured for Mexican small-scale farmers in order to avoid them paying fines for corn with a high-moisture content when selling their corn on to stores. The dryer comprised two large boxes perforated by round holes and containing stainless steel trays subjected to a hot air temperature of 45°C within the batch. The accumulated grain in both boxes was 200 mm and the airflow rate were 0.56 m3 s-1. The corn ears layer was of 80 mm of depth in each of the boxes. The airflow rate was 0.34 m3 s-1. Within eight hours, we sampled corn grain in nine points of each box and found that the mean corn grain moisture content was reduced from 30.36% to 10.47% for box 1 whereas for box 2 it was reduced until 14.72%. The fuel consumption for drying was 0.55 kg h-1 of kerosene. In Box1, the exponential regression model for corn grain moisture content had an R² of 0.9143 whereas Box 2 exponential regression model had an R² was of 0.6642. In Box 1, the exponential regression model for corn ear moisture content had an R² of 0.9616 whereas Box 2 had an R² was of 0.9400. Both models for corn cob moisture content had an R² of 0.9639. Two-layer corn dryers can be used to harness gas or fuel energy to speed up drying for storage.

In Nigeria, before the removal of subsidy on kerosene in 2016, the product was accessible to low-income individuals and is intended to be used as a fuel for cooking, lighting, or heating. Recently, kerosene is rapidly vanishing from rural families and it is becoming inaccessible due to its ever-rising cost. Therefore, to ease the hardship of low-income individuals to have access to high thermal efficiency cookers with affordable fuel, a study was carried out to determine the thermal efficiency and fuel consumption rate of a pressure cooker fueled with a blend of waste vegetable oil and kerosene. Based on this, a low-cost pressure cooker was developed with locally available materials to aid the atomization of fuel during cooking. Along with this, vegetable oil was blended with kerosene to enhance the quantity of kerosene used to fuel the pressure cooker. This cooker fueled with blends of vegetable oil and kerosene was analyzed for its thermal efficiency and fuel consumption rate and was also compared to the conventional kerosene stove. The result shows that the constructed pressure cooker has a thermal efficiency of 52% which is 20% more than the conventional kerosene stove but the developed pressure cooker consumes more fuel (48.62 ml) than the conventional kerosene wick stove (33.78 ml). Though the pressure cooker consumes more fuel, the thermal efficiency per time with respect to the fuel consumed is much better than conventional kerosene stoves which makes the developed cooker cheaper and more affordable both to low-income earners and for rural dwellers.