Design and fabrication of a manually operated poultry feed pelleting machine.

Abstract

Uganda's economy is largely agro-based and in an attempt to improve the income base, the developing technology has to meet the needs of the farmers. The poultry sub sector is crucially important in the context of agricultural growth and improvement of diets of the people in Uganda. For poultry birds to do well- well balanced poultry feed pellets should be available. Some motorised poultry feed pelletisers have been' set up but have of limitations. The machines are expensive to buy expensive to maintain cannot be operated in times of power blackouts and also cannot be used. in rural settlements where electricity supply is not in existence. Therefore. the objective of the study was to design, develop and lest a manually operated poultry feed pelleting machine for small scale farmers. This will therefore help small scale farmers make their own easily digestible pellets, reduce feed loss during feeding help farmers’ poultry farmers feed their birds on balanced feeds. The design of the various machine parts was carried out by analysing forces acting on them. Force analysis led to selection of proper materials to withstand the forces to avoid failure. Mild steel was the main material used because they it is readily available and cost effective. Engineering drawings of the various components were drawn before- the various components Were constructed. Then prototype assembly was done last according to the engineering drawings. A fully functional prototype resulted after all the above Operations. Testing of the prototype was carried out and the machine had a maximum pelleting efficiency of 87.4% and machine output capacity of 19.2kg/hr. Moisture content constitute the greater portion of variability in efficiency. A unit increase in moisture content resulted in an increase of about 20% in pelletizing efficiency. The adoption of the pelletizing machine by small and medium Scale farmers would go a. long way in helping them to produce their own feed with local contents thereby alleviating the problems associated with the sourcing of imported feeds.