Development and Testing of an Animal Feed Mixing Machine

An animal feed mixing machine was designed, developed and tested. The machine was tested using a feed components divided into three equal measures of 50 kg for ground corn, 0.265 kg for cassava flour and 2.65 kg for shelled corn replicated thrice at four mixing durations of 5, 10, 15 and 20 min. The average CV is 4.84% which shows a significant reduction in feed components for the samples tested. The degree of mixing attained was 95.16% which portrays an improvement of about 7.8% reduction in non-uniformity of components among samples when the mixing duration was 10 min. The result further indicates an increase in the level of difficulty associated with intimate blending as the mixture approaches its equilibrium level (from 78.15% at 5 minutes increase by 9.21% at 10 minutes and by 7.8% at 15 minutes). Also the average weights of ungrounded corn of 24.90 g, 24.80 g and 24.40 g recovered from the three replicates had corresponding coefficient of variations of 4.81%, 5.31% and 3.96% respectively during a 20 minutes mixing process. The average value of coefficient of variation for the three replicates here was 4.69% indicating that, the mixer’s performance was pegged at 95.31%.