Executive Summary
Parameter | Before Upgrade | After Hongyang SZLH420 Line
Nominal throughput (broiler feed, 3.5 mm die) | 6–8 t/h | 10–12 t/h
Pellet Durability Index (PDI) | 88–90% | 96–98%
Fines return rate | 8–12% | Below 3%
Unplanned downtime (monthly) | 12–18 hours | Under 4 hours
Specific energy consumption (kWh/t) | 24–27 | 19–21
Operator complaints (heat stress related) | Frequent | Rare
Kuwait’s poultry feed sector produced approximately 62,000 metric tons of chicken meat in 2024 (FAOSTAT), yet domestic consumption reached 252,000 metric tons—leaving a substantial gap met by imports (IndexBox, 2025). With feed representing 65–70% of broiler production costs, local feed manufacturers face intense pressure to improve pellet quality and throughput while contending with ambient temperatures that routinely exceed 45°C during the six-month Gulf summer.
This case study documents a mid-tier Kuwaiti poultry integrator—operating a dedicated feed mill in the Shuwaikh industrial zone—that replaced an aging 8 t/h pellet line with a Hongyang SZLH420 ring die pellet mill system in early 2025. After eight months of continuous operation, the mill has delivered pellet durability above 96%, throughput stability within ±5% of nameplate capacity, and a measurable improvement in broiler feed conversion ratio attributable to reduced fines in delivered feed.
1. Market Context: Kuwait’s Poultry Feed Landscape
Kuwait’s animal protein feed material market was valued at approximately USD 38.6 million in 2025, growing at a compound annual rate of 4.3% (Market Data Forecast, 2025). The country depends overwhelmingly on imported feed ingredients—corn, soybean meal, and protein concentrates—due to negligible domestic crop agriculture. This import dependence makes every ton of finished feed precious: wastage from pellet fines or inconsistent pellet hardness translates directly into higher import bills and reduced margins.
Within the Gulf Cooperation Council, Kuwait ranks as the third-largest poultry consumer after Saudi Arabia and the UAE, accounting for roughly 9.9% of regional chicken meat consumption (IndexBox, 2025). The Kuwait United Poultry Company (KUPCO), established in 1974 and listed on the Kuwait Stock Exchange since 1976, exemplifies the vertically integrated model that dominates the sector—companies that breed, process, and distribute poultry products and increasingly invest in captive feed milling to control input costs and quality.
Three structural pressures bear on Kuwaiti feed mills:
- Ambient heat loads: Summer daytime temperatures of 45–50°C stress electrical systems, raise cooling water temperatures, and accelerate wear on bearings and V-belts. Pellet cooler performance degrades when inlet air exceeds 40°C, making it difficult to bring pellet temperature below ambient +5°C before storage.
- Ingredient variability: Kuwait sources corn from Brazil, Argentina, India, and the Black Sea region. Moisture content, starch gelatinization behavior, and mycotoxin load vary significantly between shipments, demanding flexible grinding and conditioning parameters.
- Pellet quality expectations: Broiler integrators benchmark pellet quality by the proportion of intact pellets reaching the feeder pan. PDI below 92% produces fines that birds sort against, reducing effective feed intake and worsening FCR.
2. Customer Profile and Operational Requirements
The subject mill—a privately held poultry integrator with approximately 1.2 million broilers placed per cycle across five farms—operates a single-shift feed mill in Shuwaikh Industrial Area. Prior to the upgrade, the mill ran a 2012-vintage pellet line built around a European-brand 8 t/h press that had become unreliable: frequent bearing seizures during summer months, die changeovers requiring 5–6 hours, and PDI values drifting below 90% when corn moisture dropped below 12%.
Management set five requirements for the replacement line:
1. Sustained throughput: 10 t/h minimum for 3.5 mm broiler finisher pellets, with capacity for 4.0 mm and 4.5 mm pellet sizes as production schedules dictated.
2. PDI above 95%: Measured by Holmen tester, with fines below 5% at the farm gate after pneumatic delivery.
3. Summer reliability: Full rated output at 45°C ambient, with bearing temperature alarms and automatic lubrication to prevent heat-related failures.
4. Rapid die changes: Ring die swap completed within 90 minutes by a two-man crew, essential for a mill producing three pellet diameters across broiler starter, grower, and finisher formulations.
5. Local service support: Supplier must provide remote diagnostics and, when necessary, on-site technical assistance within the GCC region.
After evaluating proposals from three Asian and two European manufacturers, the mill selected Hongyang Feed Machinery’s SZLH420 package, comprising:
- SFSP138×38E hammer mill (132 kW) with air-assisted discharge
- SLHSJ2 double-shaft paddle mixer (2-ton batch, 18.5 kW)
- SZLH420 ring die pellet mill (110 kW) with stainless steel conditioner
- SKLN24 counterflow cooler with cyclone separation
- Rotary screener for fines recovery
3. Equipment Configuration and Technical Rationale
3.1 SZLH420 Ring Die Pellet Mill: Engineering for Thermal Stability
The SZLH420 at the heart of the line incorporates several design features that proved decisive for Kuwaiti conditions. The main drive uses a hardened precision-ground gear pair with involute tooth profile, direct-coupled to the 110 kW main motor via a flexible pin coupling—eliminating the belt-drive arrangement that had caused slippage and tension drift on the predecessor machine.
Gear-driven transmission achieves 98% mechanical efficiency versus 92–94% for equivalent belt drives (CPM Pellet Mill Engineering Guide, 2022), a 4–6 percentage-point gain that translates to approximately 4.4–6.6 kW less heat rejected into the mill room—meaningful when ambient temperature is already 45°C.
The bearing housing uses NSK spherical roller bearings rated for 80°C continuous operation, fed by a programmable oil lubrication pump that meters 0.6–1.0 cc per bearing per hour based on operator-set intervals. A temperature probe on each bearing housing triggers an alarm at 75°C and an automatic shutdown at 85°C, preventing the catastrophic inner-ring expansion failures common in high-temperature pellet mill service.
The stainless steel conditioner—measuring 2.5 m in overall length with a 420 mm inner diameter—provides a theoretical retention time of 45–90 seconds depending on shaft speed and fill level. Retention time above 60 seconds is strongly correlated with improved starch gelatinization: research compiled by ringdies.com (2024) assigns approximately 20% of PDI variance to conditioning parameters, second only to feed formulation at 40%.
3.2 Supporting Equipment: Hammer Mill, Mixer, and Cooler
The SFSP138×38E hammer mill was specified with a 2.0 mm screen for broiler feed—sufficiently fine to ensure uniform conditioning but coarse enough to avoid excessive electrical load. Particle size distribution analysis after commissioning showed 92% passing 1.8 mm with a geometric mean diameter of 720 microns, within the 600–800 micron range recommended for broiler pellet feed (Amerah et al., 2007, *World’s Poultry Science Journal*).
The SLHSJ2 double-shaft paddle mixer uses counter-rotating shafts with adjustable paddles pitched at 45°. Coefficient of variation (CV) for a tracer salt test measured 4.2% after 90 seconds of mixing—below the 5% threshold commonly accepted for micro-ingredient uniformity in poultry feed.
The SKLN24 counterflow cooler with a 24 m³ chamber employs ambient air drawn countercurrent to pellet flow. Under Kuwait’s summer conditions (ambient 45°C, relative humidity 10–15%), the cooler brings pellet temperature from approximately 80°C post-die to 48–50°C at discharge—within 5°C of ambient as required. A rotary screener mounted below the cooler discharge separates fines for re-pelleting, ensuring that only intact pellets proceed to the finished feed silo.
4. Commissioning and Performance Results
Commissioning took place over ten working days in January 2025, Kuwait’s cool season (ambient 18–24°C). Hongyang dispatched a two-engineer commissioning team who worked alongside the mill’s maintenance crew to align motors, calibrate the conditioner steam valve, and establish baseline die settings.
4.1 Pellet Quality
The mill runs three standard broiler formulations:
Formulation | Die (mm) | Compression Ratio | Target PDI | Achieved PDI
Starter (0–14 days) | 3.5 | 1:9.5 | ≥95% | 97.2%
Grower (15–28 days) | 4.0 | 1:9.0 | ≥95% | 96.8%
Finisher (29–42 days) | 4.5 | 1:8.5 | ≥95% | 96.4%
Conditioning temperature is maintained at 82–85°C with saturated steam at 1.5–2.0 bar, producing a mash moisture of 15.5–16.5% at the conditioner discharge. The starch gelatinization window for corn-based poultry diets opens around 65°C and accelerates above 80°C (Thomas & van der Poel, 1996, *Animal Feed Science and Technology*); operation at 82–85°C places the process squarely within the effective gelatinization range without risking the Maillard browning reactions that begin above 90°C and can reduce lysine availability.
4.2 Summer Operation
The critical test arrived in June 2025 when daytime temperatures exceeded 48°C on consecutive days. The gear-driven transmission maintained stable operating temperature—bearing housing thermocouples read 68–72°C under full load, well within the 75°C alarm threshold. The automatic lubrication system delivered uninterrupted oil flow, eliminating manual greasing intervals that had interrupted production on the old line.
Pellet cooler performance held the pellet-to-ambient temperature differential at 3–5°C through all operating conditions except one afternoon when a dust-laden condenser coil reduced chiller capacity temporarily—a plant-infrastructure issue unrelated to the pellet line equipment.
4.3 Throughput and Energy Consumption
Running the 3.5 mm die at 110 kW motor load (92% of rated power), the SZLH420 achieved a sustained throughput of 11.2 t/h on standard broiler finisher formulation—exceeding the 10 t/h guarantee. Specific energy consumption measured 19.8 kWh/t at the pellet mill main motor, a 21% reduction from the 25.1 kWh/t recorded on the predecessor machine. When including the hammer mill and auxiliary motors, total line energy consumption averaged 38.5 kWh/t, compared to 46.2 kWh/t pre-upgrade.
Die changeover time was documented across six scheduled changes: the two-man crew completed each swap in 72–95 minutes, averaging 82 minutes—within the 90-minute target. The die-lifting trolley supplied by Hongyang eliminated the need for overhead crane access during die extraction, a feature the maintenance supervisor cited as the single biggest ergonomic improvement.
5. Producer Feedback and Downstream Impact
Eight months into operation, the feed mill manager reported three concrete benefits:
Reduced feed wastage at the farm: The proportion of fines measured in feeder pans after pneumatic delivery dropped from approximately 10% to below 4%. Broiler performance records for the March–June 2025 cycle showed an average FCR of 1.72 across all five farms, versus 1.77 for the same period in 2024—a 2.8% improvement consistent with published research that attributes 1–3 points of FCR degradation to pellet fines exceeding 5% (Briggs et al., 1999, *Journal of Applied Poultry Research*).
Fewer emergency maintenance calls: Unplanned downtime fell from 12–18 hours per month to under 4 hours. The automatic bearing lubrication system was credited with eliminating the predominant failure mode on the old line: grease-starved bearing seizures during peak summer load.
Consistent pellet appearance: The mill supplies pellets to contract growers who visually judge feed quality. “The pellets look the same every load—same length, same sheen, same hardness,” the procurement manager noted. “Growers stopped calling to complain about dusty feed.”
6. Industry Implications
Kuwait’s poultry self-sufficiency remains below 30%, well under Saudi Arabia’s 60% achieved in 2024 (Saudi FoodTech, 2025). The Kuwaiti government’s food security strategy identifies domestic feed manufacturing capacity as a priority investment area—a direction that aligns with broader GCC trends toward reducing dependence on imported finished feed.
For mid-tier integrators in Kuwait and neighboring Gulf markets, the SZLH420 line represents a capital-efficient pathway to upgrade pellet quality without oversizing capacity. The 10–12 t/h throughput range matches the requirements of farms placing 1–2 million broilers per cycle—a sweet spot in the GCC’s fragmented poultry sector where mega-mills (20+ t/h) are overcapitalized relative to farm output.
The eight-month dataset from this installation demonstrates that properly engineered ring die pellet mill technology, when paired with conditioning parameters tuned to local ingredient profiles and cooling systems sized for extreme ambient temperatures, can deliver European-grade pellet quality in the Gulf’s challenging climate. The Hongyang technical team’s willingness to commission the line on-site and provide continuing remote support—conducting monthly video inspections of bearing temperatures, die wear patterns, and roller adjustment—was cited by the customer as a key differentiator versus suppliers who shipped equipment with only a multilingual manual and a parts list.
Sources
1. FAOSTAT. (2026). Chicken Meat Production in Kuwait, 1961–2024. Via HelgiLibrary.
2. IndexBox. (2025). GCC Chicken Meat Market Overview 2024–2035.
3. Market Data Forecast. (2025). Kuwait Animal Protein Feed Material Market, 2025–2030.
4. Alibaba.com Product Insights. (2025). Animal Feed Kuwait: Key Features and Practical Uses.
5. Kuwait United Poultry Company (KUPCO). Company Profile. Via KuwaitLocal.
6. Saudi FoodTech. (2025). Saudi Arabia Raises Poultry Self-Sufficiency to 60% in 2024.
7. RingDies.com. (2024). Feed Pellet Durability (PDI) Improvement Methods.
8. CPM. (2022). Pellet Mill Engineering Guide.
9. Amerah, A.M., Ravindran, V., Lentle, R.G., & Thomas, D.G. (2007). Feed particle size: Implications on the digestion and performance of poultry. *World’s Poultry Science Journal*, 63(3), 439–455.
10. Thomas, M., & van der Poel, A.F.B. (1996). Physical quality of pelleted animal feed: Criteria for pellet quality. *Animal Feed Science and Technology*, 61(1–4), 89–112.
11. Briggs, J.L., Maier, D.E., Watkins, B.A., & Behnke, K.C. (1999). Effect of ingredients and processing parameters on pellet quality. *Journal of Applied Poultry Research*, 8(2), 146–155.
Post time: Jul-09-2026
