Design Modification And Performance Evaluation Of Fish Feed Pelletizing Machine: Maduka Kingsley N.

ABSTRACT

Owing to the current shift to Agriculture in Nigeria, alot of interest have been drawn to griculture particularly livestock production. Creating an increase in demand for pelleting nachine. In the pa st few decades, a lot of researchers have put up researches on how to :ustomize a local pelletizer that won't just be affordable but also highly efficient. This work is eared towards design modification of a pelleting machine by integrating the different units as mne as well as attaching a drying unit to the machine to ensure a complete fish feed production rocess from scratch (beginning) to end(drying). To accomplish this, a metal tray roller was itted in the dryer to serve as a conveyor from point of pelleting droplet to the point of drying. At he end, various performance test was carried out on the machine, they include the throughput iapacity which was determined as 16.99kg/hr, machine efficiency which yielded 86.1 %, noisture content removal which gave 13%.and rate of heat transfer at varying distances using Comsol Multiphysics. The optimal dryness relation was obtained at 13%, 80C. Therefore this nachine is suitable for small and medium scale fish feed production.