Conceptual Design of Animal Feed Chopper with Medium Capacity

Abstract

Agriculture is the backbone of Ethiopia economy directly or indirectly and most of its population is residing in rural areas. The majority of rural community is engaged in agricultural crop production, cattle farming and poultry production. To prepare feed for animals, the conventional feed cutting machines are intensively used which do not have friendly operation. Chopping of animal feed is considered as a labour intensive processing operation in animal production system. Traditionally, animal feed, especially crop residue are chopped manually by a sickle in the farms of Ethiopia. It is a labor intensive, less efficient and time consuming operation. Keeping in view, the drawbacks of the traditional chopping, this study has been carried out for the design animal feed chopper machine in order to reduce the above mentioned. Engine operated animal feed chopper has been designed for chopping of crop residue and hay. The machine was designed with the following main components: feeding hopper, feed roller, rotating blade, casing with fixed knives welded on it, a screen and stands. The machine was seated treatment based on the design concepts and designed up to capacity 300 kg /hr. This machine was design keeping in view its multifunctional operation like for the cutting of maize stacks, sorghum stack, agricultural crop biomass etc. The provision was provided to run this machine at variable speeds for different jobs/applications and to achieve variability in particle sizes. The economic production of designed animal feed chopper machine was simple and its cost 10,618.45ETBirr.