DESIGN, DEVELOPMENT AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF A HORIZONTAL RIBBON -TYPE LIVESTOCK FEED MIXER

Abstract

Feed mixing machines are used in feed mills for the mixing of feed ingredients and premixes. Livestock production is lagging in efficiency thus resulting in low production output Because of lack of feeding system. Hence, the main objective of this study is to design, develop, and evaluate the performance of feed mixing machine for effective mixing, in order to achieve the best quality livestock production output. In order to achieve this objective a horizontal ribbon-type animal feed mixing machine was designed, developed and tested. The machine was tested using the following ingredients; a feed composed of 48.6 kg crushed corn, 23.2 kg wheat bran, 12 kg nug cake, 6.4 kg crushed soybean, 5 kg fish meal, 3.2 kg premix, 0. 5 kg methionine, and 1.5 kg maize grain. The mixing operation was performed with each trial being replicated tracer at three mixing times of 5, 10, and 15 minutes, two feed rate of 50kg and 100kg, and three machine speeds of 50, 80 and 100 rpm. This was carried out as a procedure to identify the types, machine parameters, operational parameters and physical properties of feed relevant to the performance of t h e horizontal ribbon-type livestock feed mixer. The effectiveness of mixing was assessed on the basis of machine productivity (MP %), degree of mixing (DM %) and machine efficiency (ME %) of sample collected at the end of each test. Data collected were analyzed using R- software at 95% Confidence Interval. The results indicated that moisture content of the feed samples ranged from 4.56 to 13.04% (% wb), the geometric mean diameter of all samples ranged from 663.57 to 892.31 µm with the geometric standard deviation range of 2.30–2.45. The machine has higher throughput capacity of 1200 kg/hr with maximum mixing efficiency of 98.98%.while a degree of mixing (95.51 %) was obtained at machine speed of 80 rpm and mixing time of 10 min. Hence, it can be concluded that the machine should be operated at speed of 80 rpm with maximum mixing time of 10 min in order to get maximum degree mixing and machine efficiency. It is recommended that the developed machine is subjected to testing for long period for more performance evaluation results to be evaluated.