Executive Summary
Country / Region: Myanmar, Ayeyarwady Delta (Pathein area)
Customer: Local aquafeed producer serving black tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon) and Pacific white shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) farms
Main Equipment: SZLH420 ring die pellet mill with double-layer (two-stage) conditioner
Capacity: 2-3 T/H for shrimp feed (φ1.5, 1.8, 2.0 mm dies)
Conditioning: 1st layer 75-80 °C / 16-17% moisture; 2nd layer 85-90 °C / 17.5-18% moisture; total retention ~90 s
Pellet Quality: PDI 95-96% (Holmen 30 s); water stability 3.5-4 hours; fines < 1.5%
Daily Output: 50-60 t/day, 2-shift operation
Service & Support: On-site commissioning, 6-month performance follow-up, local spare parts via Mandalay warehouse
Market Context: Aquafeed Demand in the Ayeyarwady Delta
The Ayeyarwady Delta, anchored by the port city of Pathein, is the heart of Myanmar’s black tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon) farming. Government data published by Xinhua in July 2024 confirmed that Myanmar aims to release over 40 million fingerlings in FY 2024-25, with annual fingerling production exceeding 100 million; the surplus supports commercial pond stocking across the delta, Taninthayi and Yangon regions. On the export side, the Taninthayi Region Fisheries Federation reported that 5,946 tonnes of Panamei (Pacific white) shrimp were exported by December in the 2024-25 financial year, with frozen cuts shipped to Japan and boiled products to China, and the country is actively working to expand brackish-water production beyond the monsoon season.
Against this expansion, the local aquafeed supply has lagged. Industry coverage by eFeedLink in late 2009 already noted 26 fish-feed factories concentrated in Yangon, Pathein, Mandalay and a handful of secondary towns, but a decade later the shrimp-feed segment is still largely supplied by pellets trucked in from Thailand and Vietnam. The gap is most visible at the pond bank: imported feed commands a premium, arrives on inconsistent schedules, and frequently drifts in PDI and water stability once the container has been on the road for weeks. For the delta integrator profiled in this case, that volatility was the reason to bring pelleting in-house.
The Customer: A Forward-Integrating Shrimp Farm Group
The customer is a family-owned aquaculture group that has operated roughly 120 hectares of black tiger shrimp ponds around the Pathein township for more than fifteen years. The owner is a second-generation farmer; he sells most of his harvest to a Yangon-based seafood exporter and contracts another 40 hectares of smallholders under a feed-and-offtake arrangement. In early 2025, after two consecutive cycles in which imported shrimp crumble lost more than 8% of its volume to breakage during the Yangon-Pathein road haul, the group decided to install its own shrimp-feed line, sized to cover its own ponds plus contract supply to neighbouring farms.
The original specification request, tendered to several Chinese and European suppliers, was for a 2 T/H aquafeed line. The non-negotiable quality parameters were: pellet durability index (PDI, Holmen 30 s) above 95% on a 1.8 mm die; water stability above 3 hours in still seawater at 28 °C; and the ability to run shrimp, fish and crab formulations on the same conditioner without a major rebuild between recipes. Price was secondary.
Why the Double-Layer Conditioner Became the Decisive Specification
Most ring-die pellet mills in the 1-5 T/H class ship with a single-layer conditioner. For poultry and most livestock feed, a single chamber with 30-40 seconds of retention is sufficient. For shrimp feed it is not. Industry references converge on the same physical reason: shrimp feed is formulated at 17-18% moisture and 85-90 °C exit temperature, both significantly higher than poultry feed, and the binding action depends on near-complete starch gelatinization and partial protein denaturation, which in turn require both higher moisture and longer exposure to heat than a single-stage conditioner can deliver.
A double-layer conditioner resolves this in a compact footprint. The first chamber acts as a preconditioner: ground mash enters at ambient temperature, steam is injected axially through multiple nozzles, and the paddle agitator drives the material forward while the temperature climbs to roughly 75-80 °C and moisture to 16-17%. The second chamber runs as a retention / maturation stage: no additional steam is added, but a slower agitator speed and a longer shaft path keep the material in contact with the hot, wet environment for another 30-40 seconds, pushing the temperature to 85-90 °C and moisture to 17.5-18%. Total residence time is in the 80-100 second range – effectively twice that of a single-layer machine – which is what the shrimp-feed formulation needs to reach 95%+ PDI.
The customer visited three competing suppliers during the bidding phase. One offered a single-layer machine at a noticeably lower price; a European brand offered a single-layer machine with an external post-conditioner (essentially two vessels in series with a transfer pipe between them). The Hongyang SZLH420 with the integrated double-layer conditioner was the only one-piece design that gave him 90 s of conditioning in a single integrated frame, with a single PLC loop and a single operator station. That integration – and the fact that the conditioner, feeding chute and hopper are all built in stainless steel to resist the chloride-rich Pathein coastal air – was the deciding factor.
Equipment Configuration and Process Flow
The complete 2-3 T/H line delivered to Pathein has the following main items:
Receiving & Grinding: SFSP hammer mill, 55 kW (1.0-1.2 mm screen for shrimp feed)
Batching & Mixing: Twin-shaft paddle mixer, 1,000 L, 18.5 kW (90 s mixing, CV <= 5%)
Conditioning: Double-layer conditioner (Hongyang), 11 kW (75-80 / 85-90 °C, ~90 s retention)
Pelleting: SZLH420 ring die pellet mill, 110 kW (1.5 / 1.8 / 2.0 mm dies; 2.5-3 T/H on 1.8 mm)
Cooling: SKLN counterflow cooler (Pellet temp drop from 88 °C to ambient +5 °C)
Crumbling: SSLG25x170 roller crumbler, 18.5 kW (Crumble 0.5-1.0 mm for juvenile stages)
Screening & Packing: Rotary screener + auto bagger (Fines removal, 25 / 40 kg bag options)
The double-layer conditioner uses food-grade stainless steel contact surfaces, axial steam injection, and quick-release agitator paddles. PLC-controlled steam valves modulate pressure in the 2-4 bar range; the operator only sets the target temperature on the HMI, and the controller trims steam flow every two seconds. A PT100 sensor at the outlet of the second chamber is the closed-loop reference.
Commissioning and First-Month Results
Hongyang sent a commissioning engineer to Pathein for 12 days. The first three days were used to verify the steam supply from the customer’s 4-ton biomass boiler, calibrate the temperature sensors, and run a cold-start trial of the mill at empty load. The next six days were spent running four formulations – a 35% crude-protein black tiger grower, a 28% CP vannamei finisher, a 30% CP mud-crab feed, and a 20% CP tilapia floating-feeder – and tuning the steam pressure and paddle speeds of each conditioner layer for each recipe. The final three days covered operator hand-over, lockout-tagout procedures, and a Holmen PDI test session that the customer’s QC team will repeat monthly.
The first full month of two-shift operation produced the following results across roughly 1,500 tonnes of finished shrimp feed:
Hourly throughput (1.8 mm die): target 2.0 T/H / achieved 2.4 T/H
PDI, Holmen 30 s: target >= 95.0% / achieved 95.6%
Water stability, 28 °C still seawater: target >= 3.0 h / achieved 3.6 h
Conditioning temp, 2nd layer outlet: target 85-90 °C / achieved 87.4 °C
Moisture after cooling: target <= 12.5% / achieved 12.1%
Fines in finished bag: target <= 2.0% / achieved 1.4%
Specific energy, mill + conditioner: target <= 45 kWh/t / achieved 42.8 kWh/t
The owner reported a perceptible change in the pond-side behaviour within the first two weeks: feed pellets stayed intact through the full four-hour feeding window, turbidity in the ponds dropped because fewer fines were leaching into the water column, and the feed conversion ratio on the 35% CP black tiger formulation improved from an estimated 1.55 (with the previous imported feed) to 1.42. The most concrete gain, however, was logistic: the customer stopped placing weekly emergency orders for Thai truckloads and began scheduling production against his own farm cycle, which removed roughly 8-10 days of buffer inventory from his balance sheet.
Service, Spare Parts and Local Presence
A shrimp feed line that goes silent during the vannamei stocking window is not a line that earns its keep. Hongyang’s service commitment on this project includes a 6-month scheduled performance visit by the regional engineer based in Yangon, a recommended spare-parts kit (one set of roller shells, two ring dies, agitator paddles, bearings and a standard seal kit) shipped with the line and stored in the customer’s Mandalay warehouse, and a 24-hour response window for remote video support from the Jiangsu head office. Routine wearing parts are inventoried at the Mandalay warehouse to reach Pathein within 36 hours by road.
Conclusion
The Pathein installation illustrates a pattern that has become more common in Southeast Asia since 2023: a forward-integrating aquaculture operator, tired of imported feed variability, chooses to install a compact, well-instrumented aquafeed line in which the conditioning stage is engineered for the realities of shrimp and crab formulations, not for the average livestock pellet. A double-layer conditioner integrated into a 2-3 T/H ring die line is, at this scale, the most cost-effective way to reach the 95% PDI and 3-hour water stability that the shrimp farm actually needs. For Hongyang, the case confirms that the next wave of growth in the regional aquafeed market will not be won on pellet-mill tonnage alone, but on the conditioning technology that determines whether those pellets survive the trip from the bag to the pond.
Post time: Jul-08-2026
