Development and Performance Evaluation of Animal Feed Chopper
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Ethiopia’s livestock population is the largest in Africa; however, different factors or constraints limit the full exploitation of the agricultural sector in general and the livestock "sub-sector" in particular. In the country, the availability, quality, and quantity of feed have always been challenges in the livestock sector. This process is laborious, and it takes longer. To alleviate this problem, using maize and sorghum stalks is an important remedy has chopped. The developed machine consist the part of frame made up of angle iron 40mmx40mmx4mm, chopper house made from sheet-metal 2 mm thickness, cutter blades:- was the main functional unit made up of treaded milled steel that performs the chopping action with a cutting depth of 1 cm and a cutting length of 6 cm and was made up of 6 mm thickness and 4cm width developed to cut the feed to the recommended lengths with reasonable consistency. Therefore, the developed machine was evaluated. The research was conducted at Jimma Agricultural Engineering Research Centre (JAERC), Kersa districts to evaluate the machine's performance in terms of chopping efficiency, throughput capacity, and cutting efficiency at different speeds of the cutter shaft. The output of the chopper was found to be a remarkable achievement. The performance of the machine was evaluated with treatments of the maize and sorghum stalks, engine speed and feed rate 9kg/min, 11kg/min and 13 kg/min using a factorial design with three replications. The highest mean chopping capacity of maize and sorghum stalk ((776.80 kg/hr, 778.00 kg/hr)), the finest (shortest) mean cutting length of maize and sorghum stalk ((1.03 cm, 0.97 cm)), the highest chopping efficiency of maize and sorghum stalk ((98.91%, 99.12%)) were recorded. The operational speed was observed to be highly significant among the treatments, at 5% significance level. Based on the results obtained, it is recommended that the machine can be demonstrated for small to medium-scale farmers.
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