A sustainable Approach for Improving Air Quality in a Poultry House

Abstract

Maintaining bird health in layer poultry houses is of critical importance for a sustainable production quality. This is directly related to the thermal environment of the laying hens as well as their breathable air quality. This work compares the performance of three passive cooling systems in meeting thermal and IAQ requirements in a poultry house in a semi-arid climate. The first two systems are a direct evaporative cooler (DEC) and a cross flow dew point evaporative cooler (DPIEC) supplying air through a conventional tunnel ventilation that achieves uniform thermal and IAQ conditions. The third system is a DPIEC system supplying air through a localized ventilation system in an effort to reduce air and water consumption. To achieve these objectives, a modular analysis was adopted where mathematical models were developed for the DEC/DPIEC units and the poultry house module conditioned by a tunnel ventilation. Moreover, a 3D CFD model was developed for the compartment conditioned by the localized system. The DEC/DPIEC units were sized and the hourly variation in needed supply fresh air and water was determined for the entirety of the summer season. Simulation results and a simple economic analysis showed that the DPIEC systems under conventional ventilation were more economically beneficial (4.3%) than the DEC systems, while achieving better compliance with poultry house thermal and IAQ requirements. On the other hand, using localized ventilation instead of conventional ventilation was 10% more economically beneficial, while achieving similar conditions of temperature and IAQ for less supply fresh air and water consumption.