The Optimization & Experimental Study Of Fodder Mixing Blender For Mutton Sheep

With the sustained growth of our country’s household income and the improvement of living standards, more and more people like mutton for its unique flavor, healthy and safety characteristics of high nutritional value. The traditional feeding method that concentrated feed and roughage was separated when feeding the sheep has no longer met the development requirements of modern mutton sheep industry, Total Mixed Ration(TMR), as a new farming techniques, has been widely used in mutton sheep breeding.However, the TMR mixer on the market now are mainly used in the preparation of cows’ TMR, whose particle size was typically large and due to the differences of mutton sheep and cows on the physical structure, cows’ TMR was not suitable for mutton sheep’s foraging. Therefore, on the basis of the previous studies, building a fodder mixer mixing system test bench and carrying on the experimental study and explore the best combination of the operating parameters which can produce the mutton sheep TMR was the contents of this paper.(1) Determined the overall design scheme of the test bench, and the design of the mixing chamber,discharging door, spiral auger, control and gearing system. Used Solid Works software to draw the three-dimensional model of the machine, and manufactured it.(2) Used the discrete element software EDEM to simulate the material mixing process, and described the mixing principle of the test bench by analyzing the materials motion trajectory. Analyzed the material mixing quality by the change of the number of different material contact, in order to validated that the overall design was reasonable.(3) Built the fodder mixing mixer mixing system test bench depending on the overall design scheme,and carried the experimental study. Used quadratic orthogonal rotation combination to design experimental scheme. Auger speed, mixing time, full figure and plum number of blades were the experimental factors.Blend uniformity, mass proportion of the palatable length roughage and fine powder rates were the experimental evaluation indexes. Used Design-Expert software and Excel software to process and analyze the test results, and obtained the function between each index with the corresponding experimental factors,the single factor effect curve and the two-factor interaction response surface.(4) According to the information and standards, determined the ranges of the blend uniformity,proportion of the palatable length roughage and the fine powder rates. Found the range of each experimental factor according to the test factor level value that the blend uniformity was less than 20%, the proportion of the palatable length roughage was more than 80% and the fine powder rates was less than30% by optimization solving function of Design-Expert software. Finally, the experiment indicated that the Best combination of operating parameters were auger speed 16~18 r/min, mixing time 26~31 min, full figure 40% and plum number of blades 5 every thread pitch. In the combination of the above parameters,the coefficient of variation was less than 20%, proportion of the palatable length roughage was more than80% and the fine powder rates was less than 30%,which can met the requirements of the mutton sheep foraging.(5) The results obtained in this paper provided a theoretical basis for the further development of excellent sheep feed TMR mixer.