Ammonia Generation System for Poultry Health Research Using Arduino

Mobile Robot + IoT: Project of Sustainable Technology for Sanitizing Broiler Poultry Litter

The traditional aviary decontamination process involves farmers applying pesticides to the aviary's ground. These agricultural defenses are easily dispersed in the air, making the farmers susceptible to chronic diseases related to recurrent exposure. Industry 5.0 raises new pillars of research and innovation in transitioning to more sustainable, human-centric, and resilient companies. Based on these concepts, this paper presents a new aviary decontamination process that uses IoT and a robotic platform coupled with ozonizer (O3) and ultraviolet light (UVL). These clean technologies can successfully decontaminate poultry farms against pathogenic microorganisms, insects, and mites. Also, they can degrade toxic compounds used to control living organisms. This new decontamination process uses physicochemical information from the poultry litter through sensors installed in the environment, which allows accurate and safe disinfection. Different experimental tests were conducted to construct the system. First, tests related to measuring soil moisture, temperature, and pH were carried out, establishing the range of use and the confidence interval of the measurements. The robot's navigation uses a back-and-forth motion that parallels the aviary's longest side because it reduces the number of turns, reducing energy consumption. This task becomes more accessible because of the aviaries' standardized geometry. Furthermore, the prototype was tested in a real aviary to confirm the innovation, safety, and effectiveness of the proposal. Tests have shown that the UV + ozone combination is sufficient to disinfect this environment.

Effect of Hardwood Dust and Ammonia Gas on the Respiratory Integrity of Broiler Chickens

Dust and ammonia gas (NH3) are two of the most abundant pollutants suspended in the air of poultry houses. Chronic inhalation of poultry dust and NH3 causes damage to the airways and reduces performance in broilers. Poultry dust is a mixture of organic and inorganic matter from feed, bedding material, manure, feathers, skin debris, and microorganisms. Thus, the composition and concentration of poultry dust vary among farms. This study proposes a model to assess the individual effect of a defined fraction of poultry dust derived from bedding material (wood dust) and its effects, alone or combined with NH3, on the performance and respiratory integrity of broilers. Ninety-six, 1-day-old broilers were randomly divided into groups of 24 and placed into four controlled environment chambers to continuously receive one of four treatments: 1) negative control; 2) exposure to airborne red oak wood dust at a concentration of 7.5 × 106 particles/m3 (particulate matter5.0); 3) exposure to 50 parts per million (ppm) of NH3; and 4) exposure to airborne red oak wood dust and 50 ppm of NH3. On day 43, all birds were weighed and euthanized. Performance data were recorded. Tissue samples were collected from six birds per treatment. Histologic evaluations of the nasal turbinates, trachea, and lungs were conducted. Histologic lesion scores (0 to 3) were assigned, and tracheal mucosal thickness was measured. No significant differences among treatments were found in body weight (P = 0.066), tracheal mucosal thickness (P = 0.593), or tracheal lesion score (P = 0.07). The average nasal turbinate lesion scores were higher in the wood and wood + ammonia treatments compared with the control (P = 0.015). The lung lesion scores were higher (P = 0.004) in all treatment groups compared with the control. In conclusion, chronic exposure to red oak wood dust, alone or in combination with NH3, induced important inflammatory damage to portions of the respiratory system of broilers; however, no significant effects on performance were observed.

Automatically Controlled Dust Generation System Using Arduino

A dust generator was developed to disperse and maintain a desired concentration of airborne dust in a controlled environment chamber to study poultry physiological response to sustained elevated levels of particulate matter. The goal was to maintain an indicated PM10 concentration of 50 µg/m³ of airborne dust in a 3.7 m × 4.3 m × 2.4 m (12 ft × 14 ft × 8 ft) controlled environment chamber. The chamber had a 1.5 m³/s (3200 cfm) filtered recirculation air handling system that regulated indoor temperature levels and a 0.06 m³/s (130 cfm) exhaust fan that exchanged indoor air for fresh outdoor air. Dry powdered red oak wood dust that passed through an 80-mesh screen cloth was used for the experiment. The dust generator metered dust from a rectangular feed hopper with a flat bottom belt to a 0.02 m³/s (46 cfm) centrifugal blower. A vibratory motor attached to the hopper ran only when the belt was operated to prevent bridging of powdered materials and to provide an even material feed rate. A laser particle counter was used to measure the concentration of airborne dust and provided feedback to an Arduino-based control system that operated the dust generator. The dust generator was operated using a duty cycle of one second on for every five seconds off to allow time for dispersed dust to mix with chamber air and reach the laser particle counter. The control system maintained an airborne PM10 dust concentration of 54.92 ± 6.42 µg/m³ in the controlled environment chamber during six weeks of continuous operation using red oak wood dust. An advantage of the automatically controlled dust generator was that it continued to operate to reach the setpoint concentration in response to changes in material flow due to humidity, partial blockages, and non-uniform composition of the material being dispersed. Challenges included dust being trapped by the recirculation filter and the exhaust fan removing airborne dust from the environmental chamber.

Reducing ammonia emission by aluminum sulfate addition in litter and its influence on productive, reproductive, and physiological parameters of dual-purpose breeding hens

This research investigated the impact of aluminum sulfate (AS) as amendment to different types of litter (new, reused, and mixed litters) for reducing ammonia emission and improving productive performance of local dual-purpose breeding hens. A total of 450 hens and 60 cocks from the Inshas strain were randomly assigned to six groups (five replicates each of 15 hens + 2 cocks) raised in pen floor furnished with a wheat straw litter. The groups included: (1) new, (2) reused, (3) mixed (50% new + 50% reused) litter; the other groups (4, 5 and 6) were respectively housed on the same litter as groups 1, 2 and 3 but with the addition of 495 g of AS/m² litter. The feed conversion ratio was better for layers raised on new litter with or without AS than other groups. Different kinds of litter had different moisture (p < 0.05) and pH (p < 0.05) values. Birds raised on litter types treated with AS significantly (p < 0.05) decreased intestinal pH and decreased total bacterial count compared to the same litter types without AS at the end of the experiment. Birds raised on new litter supplemented with AS had the highest plasma T3, total protein, globulin, Hgb, and PCV% and the lowest levels of uric acid and cholesterol at the end of the experimental period. Therefore, litter amendment with AS, also the mixed or reused one, could be recommended to reduce ammonia and, in turn, increasing plasma T3 and decreasing total bacterial count, leading to increasing bird's performance.

A New Analytical Method to Quantify Ammonia in Freshwater with a Bulk Acoustic Wave Sensor

A new method to analyse ammonia in freshwater, based on a piezoelectric quartz crystal coated with the metalloporphyrin chloro[5,10,15,20-tetrakis(pentafluorophenyl)porphyrinato] manganese(III) is presented. A 9 MHz quartz crystal coated on both faces with an amount of porphyrin produced a frequency decrease of 21.4 kHz, which allowed ammonia in a 10.00 mL sample to be quantified in concentrations between 5 and 70 µg L^-1, with a sensitivity of 0.60 Hz L µg^-1, over a period of at least eight months. The proposed method has several advantages over the officially recommended indophenol spectrophotometric method: sample volume was reduced by a factor of 2.5, toxic reagents (phenol and sodium nitroprusside) were eliminated, analysing turbid samples presented no difficulty, and there was not only a significant time saving in solution preparation, but also in sample analysis time, which was reduced from 1 h to 2 min. No statistically significant differences (α = 0.05) were found both in the mean and precision of the results obtained for ammonia in water samples collected from domestic wells, analysed by this new method and by the indophenol spectrophotometric method. Furthermore, the proposed method would allow the individual quantification, with similar sensitivity, of amines and ammonia within a single analytical run.