1Department of Agricultural Engineering and Land Planning, Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania
2Department of Farm Machinery and Power Engineering, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, India
*email: parmarraghuvir1@gmail.com
Online published on 23 December, 2016.
An animal feed mixing machine was designed, fabricated and tested. The design computation to handle a 25 kg mass of feed was done in the MS Excel for proper machine design approach. The machine was designed using Creo Parametric design software and proper material selection was done before the assembling and fabrication of parts. The efficiency of the machine, its associated cost of production and the product obtained after few minutes of mixing were outstanding, thereby, making the design acceptable and cost effective. The machine was tested using a feed components divided into 3.5 kg for Maize bran, 1.25 kg for Cotton/Sunflower cake, 0.15 kg for Lime, 0.075 kg for Bone meal and 0.018 kg for Salt replicated thrice at two mixing durations of 10 and 20 min. The average CV was 5.93% which shows a significant reduction in feed components for the samples tested. The degree of mixing attained was 94.06%.
Bone meal, Coefficient of Variation, Cotton/Sunflower cake, Degree of mixing, Lime, Maize bran, Salt
