PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF A NOVEL DESIGN OF FEED PELLETS VERTICAL COOLER

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Cent. Lab. Aquac. Res., Abbasa, Sharkia, Egypt

2 Agric. Eng. Dept., Fac. Agric., Zagazig Univ., Egypt

Abstract

This work aims to report a novel design of feed pellets vertical cooler named as double bed vertical cooler (DBVC). The proposed DBVC is assessed experimentally using sinking fish feed pellets produced by a ring-die pelletizer under different operating parameters including the position air double vacuum fans, height of the feed pellets as a function of pellet retention time inside the cooler and different widths of sieve slit. The performance evaluation of DBVC was performed and compared to performance of the single bed vertical pellet cooler (SBVC) that used commercially in the feed pellets industry in Egypt. The comparison was carried out at constant cooler’s capacity of 2 Mg/h for both coolers in terms of the performance indicators such as; output pellets temperature and moisture content, cooling efficiency, pellet durability, required specific energy.. etc. Moreover, the two types of coolers have been analyzed from the economic point of view using the life cycle cost (LCC) method. Under the best operating conditions for both cooler, the obtained results showed that the temperature and moisture content for the outlet pellets were reduced by about 5.55% and 10.60%, respectively by using DBVC. Using DBVC gave slight increase in cooling efficiency and pellet durability by about 3.35% and 4.60%, respectively over SBVC with an explicit reduction in the required cooling energy by about 30.83%. From the economic aspect, the total capital cost and total cooling cost per unit of production for DBVC are lower than SBVC by 73.91% ( the price difference between them saving 4885.87$) and 61.26% ( saving 0.77 $/Mg), respectively. Ultimately, it is clear that the DBVC proved a high performance and saved the costs of feed pellet cooling process

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