Prawn Farm Pellet Dispenser

Problem

Prawn and shrimp culture process is very crucial that has to be given an immense amount of care and maintenance. But doing that manually for medium and large scale farmers is a tough job. One process among the maintenance is feeding prawns with food pellet in regular interval of time. Prawns and shrimps in the ponds are usually concentrated on the edges and corners due to the presence of its own faeces in the middle. So the pellet dispensing must be done in the corners of the pond. Apart from that, the time interval between restocking of pellet should be reduced.


User

Medium and large scale prawn culture farm maintenance persons.


My Role

My role was to design a pellet dispenser which dispenses the food evenly in the corners of the pond. The design was to be simple and easy to be installed in ponds of any size.


Design Process

The challenge was to make the dispenser suit any pond environment. Designing the dispenser to dispense pellets from the top was impossible because some prawn farms will have nets to avoid hunting. So the dispenser was decided to be placed in the corners. Even distribution of pellets was a constraint when we place the dispenser in the corner. So we incorporated a mechanism that would shoot the pellets throughout the preset angle. The speed of shooting is also varied based on the pond’s size.