RESEARCH OF THE RHEOLOGICAL PARAMETERS OF FEED GRAIN IN THE PROCESS OF THE COMBINED IMPACT-CUTTING GRINDING

Abstract

Taking into consideration current realities and various factors, which create difficulties for the effective functioning of Ukraine’s national economic system, the Agro-Industrial Complex of Ukraine acts as the most stable part of it, that is characterized by conservatism and is one of the main and stable cross-sectoral formations due to revenues. However, despite the strategic priority of the AIC, the high level of energy consumption by domestic producers does not enable providing an appropriate level of competitiveness of Ukraine’s AIC in domestic and foreign markets, at the same time the rationalisation of energy use necessitates the substantiation of the energy-saving variant of its development by implementing energy-efficient machines and technologies in the system of feed preparation and feeding animals. In the technological process of feed preparation, the share of energy consumption for grinding can be more than 50%. Thus, it becomes obvious that the profitability and competitiveness of the livestock industry largely depend on the energy efficiency of realizing this technological operation, and the reduction of energy intensity in this process is an urgent task. Modelling energy-saturated mechanical processes, particularly for the grinding operation, it is necessary to consider structural-mechanical properties of the product, its ability to deform in different modes of interaction with the executive body of the technological machine. The six-link mechanical-rheological model, which is built by combining the simplest models of rheological bodies and enables reproducing the structural and mechanical properties of the object of processing – maize grain with the required degree of reliability, has been offered in the article. Theoretical research of the rheological characteristics of the material, including the assessment of the relative deformation of the maize grain in the grinding process using he impact-cutting method depending on the moisture content and internal force factors, has been conducted. In the future, the obtained results will be used to evaluate the parameters of plastic and elastic absolute deformations in the material while studying the kinetics of the grinding process.