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Ammonia (NH3) concentration has seldom been used for environmental control of weaner buildings despite its impact on environment, animal welfare, and workers’ health. This paper aims to determine the effects of setpoint temperature (ST) on the daily evolution of NH3 concentration in the animal-occupied zone. An experimental test was conducted on a...
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... radiant floor heating system was composed of two 1.20 × 0.40 m polyester spreader plates for hot water, each with a capacity of 2.90 L. The temperatures of the heating fluid ranged from 37 • C to 41 • C. The flow rate of the heating fluid was adjusted manually on the dates on which setpoint temperature (ST) was changed for ventilation purposes. The ST defined for the environmental control was in the range of 26-23 • C ( Table 1) and decreased with the increase in animal age and weight. Fresh air entered the room through two 1.50 × 0.70 m windows with air deflectors installed on the wall opposite to the fan, at both sides of the entry room door. ...Similar publications
Postweaning is one of the most sensitive and energy-demanding phases of swine production. The objective of this research was to assess the energy, production and environmental characteristics of a conventional farm with temperature-based environmental control. The selected energy, environmental and production variables were measured on farm, in a h...
Citations
... The models developed until now used environmental variables such as ventilation rates, concentrations and emissions of various gases, mainly NH 3 and CO 2 [26][27]32,40], or temperature and humidity [41][42][43][44][45]. Some of these variables, along with animal activity, have been proposed as indicators of animal health and welfare [16,39,[46][47]. ...
... Whereas some authors have focused on estimating environmental variables and finding the correlations among them, other authors have analyzed the daily and seasonal variations of environmental variables using statistical modelling methods, such as multiple linear regression [48], Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average [49], analysis of variance [6,50] or Quantitative Correlation Analysis [13]. Similarly, other authors have designed and trained black-box models such as neural networks [51][52][53] or continuous wavelet transforms [44,46]. ...
... Specifically, daily cyclic behaviour patterns have been modelled for lighting and temperature, two factors leading to variations in animal activity [54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61]. Likewise, cyclic patterns have been found for other variables, such as gas concentrations [13,44,62]. Hence, analyzing the periodicity of temperature, animal activity or gas concentrations, along with their correlations, can contribute to a better understanding of these environmental variables. ...
... Firstly, daily average data were calculated and a moving average filter with a value of 6 was used to smooth the curves. Secondly, average values were calculated every ten minutes to provide an average daily evolution pattern [49]. Thirdly, least square fitting yielded the amplitude for every harmonic A i and the angles ϕ i in expression (1) for every variable. ...
Simple Summary
Measuring animal activity and its evolution in real time is one way of assessing animal welfare. Passive infrared sensors are a low-cost solution used in weaned piglet farming that has correlated well with human observation. In addition, using other easily measured variables that provide data about animal activity in the building, such as illuminance or noise level, is also relevant. This paper establishes relationships between animal activity as measured by passive infrared sensors, illuminance and noise levels on a conventional weaned piglet farm. Fitting a cosine model to three harmonics of animal activity has proven effective in modelling these three variables. Noise level and illuminance are easily measured variables that can provide reliable information about animal activity by implementing only one sensor, a sonometer or a lux meter. Unlike passive infrared sensors, sonometers and lux meters are not affected by the physical barriers that divide the farm.
Abstract
Measuring animal activity and its evolution in real time is useful for animal welfare assessment. In addition, illuminance and noise level are two factors that can improve our understanding of animal activity. This study aims to establish relationships between animal activity as measured by passive infrared sensors, and both illuminance and noise level on a conventional weaned piglet farm. First, regression models were applied, and then cosine models with three harmonics were developed using least squares with a Generalized Reduced Gradient Nonlinear method. Finally, all the models were validated. Linear models showed positive correlations, with values between 0.40 and 0.56. Cosine models drew clear patterns of daily animal activity, illuminance and noise level with two peaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, coinciding with human activity inside the building, with a preference for inactivity at night-time and around midday. Cosine model fitting revealed strong correlations, both in the measurement and validation periods, for animal activity (R = 0.97 and 0.92), illuminance (R = 0.95 and 0.91) and noise level (R = 0.99 and 0.92). The developed models could be easily implemented in animal welfare monitoring systems and could provide useful information about animal activity through continuous monitoring of illuminance or noise levels.
... These projections reflect the growing demand and the need for more efficient and competitive animal production facilities that incorporate improved thermal insulation to mitigate climate effects (Andreazzi et al., 2018). Integrated monitoring systems are necessary within these facilities to track variables that impact thermal comfort and animal well-being, including temperature, relative humidity, luminosity, and toxic gas concentrations (Rodriguez et al., 2020). ...
Increasing population and demand for animal-derived products has raised the need for improved efficiency in managing and controlling animal production. Given this context, the project aimed to develop a device that aids decision-making in animal production. A hardware system was designed for instant measurement of thermal well-being levels, light intensity, and air gas concentration. This hardware integrated DHT11 sensors, an LDR photoresistor, and an MQ-135 sensor. To validate the system, a 30-day experimental study was conducted in an industrial pig farming setting. The collected data was sent to the Thingspeak server using the HTTP protocol. Data management, filtering, and organization were optimized using developed treatment algorithms. The system presented information on air humidity, temperature, ammonia concentration, CO2 levels, luminosity, and enthalpy through interactive images on a dashboard. In the case of a risk situation, the system automatically notified users with an "ALERT" message, facilitating prompt and efficient management response, and minimizing losses. The sensor calibration process yielded a high coefficient of determination (r² = 0.98). Thus, the developed IoT device represents a viable solution, providing precise environmental conditions to support producers and enhance their efficiency and sustainability.
animal welfare; technological innovations; climate changes
... It is known that the intensity of the release of ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and carbon dioxide produced by pigs depends on their weight, average daily growth, animal activity, the composition of their diet, and the type of bedding [3,5,18,24,27]. However, according to widespread data, it became known that the temperature and speed of air movement in the pigsty room also reliably affected the content of hydrogen sulfide, ammonia and carbon dioxide in it [33,15,16]. In particular, the increase in the internal temperature in the room for farrowing led to an increase in the concentration of NH3. ...
... An increase in the temperature in the farrowing room leads to a more intense release of CO2 by the animals, which begin to breathe more often, and to a more intense evaporation of H2S from underground manure pits and channels, where the circulation of exhaust air is difficult and cleaning occurs with some delay [29]. This contributes to the increase in the content of carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide when the internal temperature increases, even despite the automatic forced increase of air exchange by the microclimate control system, which is consistent with other reports [33,15,23]. However, such an increase in the concentration of the specified gases in the specified space of the brooder room is not long-lasting, because despite a temporary increase in the accumulation of their volumes at the initial stage of ventilation, their further accumulation decreases as the intensity of air exchange increases to a level sufficient to remove CO2 and H2S and reduce their content to a safe level [22]. ...
The article studied the influence of temperature and humidity in the room for farrowing sows with different types of ventilation system on other microclimatic parameters and their relationship and dependence of the reproductive qualities of sows, the health of suckling piglets and the intensity of their growth on the method of room ventilation. An experiment was conducted in two separate groups of breeders (120 farrowing sows each), which were equipped with valve and geothermal systems for creating a microclimate. It was established that the valve ventilation system provides 2.12 mg/m 3 (р <0.01) lower NH3 content and 0.40 mg/m 3 (р <0.001) lower H2S content. At the same time, using the geothermal ventilation system, the weight of the piglets' nest at weaning was higher by 3.90 kg or 5.38% compared to the counterparts that were kept using valve ventilation. The level of morbidity and mortality of piglets, as well as the veterinary component of the cost of their growth, were lower when using the geothermal ventilation system. All indicators of the microclimate were in a reliable correlation relationship. In particular, as the internal temperature in the farrowing room increased, the content of CO2 and H2S also increased, but the content of NH3 and relative humidity decreased. When the relative humidity increased, the content of hydrogen sulfide decreased, but the content of ammonia and carbon dioxide also increased. The contents of NH3, CO2 and H2S were also correlated, but the relationship between them was weak.
... As weaning is the most critical period to expose stress to piglets due to environmental changes, feed, and in the thermoregulation process (Renaudeau et al., 2011;Long et al., 2021). Housing environment can play a role to minimize the concentration of NH3, H2S and CO2, emission from animal farm (Rodriguez et al., 2020;Saha et al., 2010). Now, it's time to consider animal housing aimed to enhance energy efficiency by applying renewable energy sources. ...
This study examined the effects of solar heating systems as a source of renewable energy on the growth performance, electricity uses, and housing environments of piglets. For this trial, a total of 20 piglets having a similar average body weight of 6.83 ± 1.07 kg (mean ± std.) were randomly divided into 2 (two) incubators, the control (conventional) incubator and the solar-based incubator with 10 replicates each. The experimental duration was 10 weeks (70 days). Feed intake, body weight gain, electricity consumption, and environmental parameters including temperature, humidity, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide concentration were measured on weekly basis. There were no significant differences in the final body weight, average daily body weight gain (ADG), average daily feed intake (ADFI), and feed conversion ratio (FCR), between the incubators. However, ADG was numerically higher (P > 0.05) and FCR was lower (P >0.05) in the solar heating incubator compared with the control incubator. The consumption of electricity with the solar-based incubator was reduced by 59.13 kWh/head and the saving efficacy was about 49.6% to the conventional incubator. The internal temperature was higher (P < 0.05) in solar-based incubator. The ammonia concentration and hydrogen sulfide concentration were significantly lower (P < 0.05) in solar based incubator than in the control incubator. The solar-based heating incubator might be eco-friendly and renewable source of energy for sustainable pig production.
... Humidity is In recent years, there are many predictive models applied in the field of livestock and poultry farming. For example, Rodriguez et al. (2020) used fast Fourier transform (FFT) to predict ammonia concentration in weaning piglets' houses. Besteiro et al. (2017) used the ARIMA model to predict the temperature in pig houses, which was effectively validated under long-term prediction and changing climatic conditions. ...
Good humidity control is helpful to prevent the occurrence of waterfowl diseases, so it is necessary to predict and control the humidity in waterfowl houses. Traditional sequence methods such as RNN, LSTM, and GRU face challenges in prediction accuracy and parallel performance for long sequence prediction. In this study, a novel neural network model called SRU–SRU-dense is proposed to predict the waterfowl indoor humidity for the next 6 h. Simple recurrent unit(SRU) has better parallel performance compared with LSTM and GRU, which can effectively reduce the inference time. The proposed SRU–SRU-dense model is a seq2seq model based on SRU, and the experimental results show that this model has faster prediction speed and more accurate shorter prediction accuracy than seq2seq models based on RNN, LSTM, and GRU. In addition, we also compared the performance of two different seq2seq structures, seq2seq-dense and seq2seq-sequence, and the experimental results show that the seq2seq-dense structure has faster prediction speed and better prediction accuracy in the prediction of waterfowl indoor humidity in the next 6 h.
... To minimize variability resulting from the use of manures with inconstant NH 3 concentrations, a 6000 mg NH 3 -N·L −1 synthetic solution was used in all the tests, consisting of 24.6 g NH 4 Cl·L −1 + 43.2 g NaHCO 3 ·L −1 + 10 mg N-allylthiourea·L −1 (as a nitrification inhibitor). The pH of the synthetic solutions was kept above 8 in all experiments (similar to those of real emitting sources such as pig slurry, chicken manure, laying hen manure, etc. [16,20,37] and the temperature was kept at 25 • C (which is the usual setpoint temperature in many Spanish farms [38]), to replicate real farm conditions. It is worth noting that the pH affects the TAN (NH 4 + /NH 3 ) equilibrium, in such a way that values above 8 promote the conversion of NH 4 + to NH 3 , resulting in a higher presence of free ammonia and favoring mass transfer through the membrane [39]. ...
Gas permeable membranes (GPM) are a promising technology for the capture and recovery of ammonia (NH3). The work presented herein assessed the impact of the capture solution and temperature on NH3 recovery for suspended GPM systems, evaluating at a laboratory scale the performance of eight different trapping solutions (water and sulfuric, phosphoric, nitric, carbonic, carbonic, acetic, citric, and maleic acids) at 25 and 2 °C. At 25 °C, the highest NH3 capture efficiency was achieved using strong acids (87% and 77% for sulfuric and nitric acid, respectively), followed by citric and phosphoric acid (65%) and water (62%). However, a remarkable improvement was observed for phosphoric acid (+15%), citric acid (+16%), maleic acid (+22%), and water (+12%) when the capture solution was at 2 °C. The economic analysis showed that water would be the cheapest option at any working temperature, with costs of 2.13 and 2.52 €/g N (vs. 3.33 and 3.43 €/g N for sulfuric acid) in the winter and summer scenarios, respectively. As for phosphoric and citric acid, they could be promising NH3 trapping solutions in the winter months, with associated costs of 3.20 and 3.96 €/g N, respectively. Based on capture performance and economic and environmental considerations, the reported findings support that water, phosphoric acid, and citric acid can be viable alternatives to the strong acids commonly used as NH3 adsorbents in these systems.
... When air characterized by a high speed passes over the free surface of the manure, the emissions increase. Rodriguez et al. [39] found an inverse behavior between NH 3 concentration and relative humidity, and a direct relation between NH 3 concentration and indoor air temperature in weaning rooms, results that are similar to the ones of Banhazi [35]. ...
In the last decades, an engineering process has deeply transformed livestock houses by introducing fine-tuned climate control systems to guarantee adequate indoor climate conditions needed to express the maximum genetic potential of animals and to increase their productivity. Climate control, hence, has strong relation with productivity but also with other livestock production domains, outlining a web of mutual relations between them. The objective of this work is to understand the actual role of climate control in intensive livestock houses by unpicking this web of mutual relations through a literature review. The results show that climate control plays a key role in intensive livestock houses since it has strong relations with animal welfare, air emissions, productivity, health, and energy use. These relations make it essential to adopt an integrated approach for the assessment of the effectiveness of any proposed improvement in the different domains of livestock production. This is especially true considering aspects such as the expected increase of livestock production in developing countries and global warming. For this purpose, integrated climate control models of livestock houses are needed, representing a challenging opportunity for performing investigations in this research field.
... Thus, concentrations of NH 3 for both temperatures derive from normal populations. After that, we worked with two different datasets based on T S , T S = 26 • C or T S = 25 • C [17]. ...
Measuring ammonia inside livestock buildings poses many challenges that hinder the incorporation of this variable into environmental control systems. The aim of this study was to measure various microclimate variables inside a weaned piglet building and analyse their interactions with NH3 concentrations for setpoint temperatures of 26 and 25 °C, in order to control NH3 concentrations based on other easily measurable variables. The experimental test was conducted on a conventional farm in Northwest Spain. NH3 concentrations in the animal zone were best correlated with CO2 concentrations in the animal zone (R = 0.91 and R = 0.55) and velocity of air extracted through the fan (R = 0.72 and R = 0.65) for setpoint temperatures of 26 and 25 °C, respectively. Similarly, strong correlations were found with relative humidity in the animal zone and temperature of inlet air. Because NH3 concentration in the animal zone is related to the performance of the ventilation system, strong positive correlations were found between NH3 concentration and temperature of inlet air whereas negative correlations were found between NH3 concentration and ventilation rates. Linear regression models based on CO2 concentrations in the animal zone and temperature of inlet air are recommended, because they provide a good fit for both setpoint temperatures using variables that can be readily measured.
... NH3 concentrations in swine buildings show large variations and are related to a number of factors, including animal age, activity and density, outdoor temperature, ventilation control (Rodriguez, 2020). Ammonia emissions are obviously influenced by season with typically higher emission rates during summer time (about 7.0 g NH3/pig/day) and lower emission during winter time (about 3.0 NH3/pig/day). ...
Agriculture contributes significantly to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG). Livestock production, including pig production, is associated with several gaseous pollutants released into the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3) and nitrous oxide (N2O). Emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including alcohols, aldehydes, and aromatic and aliphatic hydrocarbons, as well as typically odorous pollutants, are an inseparable element of raising and breeding farm animals. These emissions can degrade local and regional air quality, contribute to surface water eutrophication and acid rain, and increase the greenhouse gas footprint of the production sector. The paper is organized as follows. First, the sources and factors influencing the level of emissions from pig houses are described. Next, the effects of dietary methods (optimization of animal diets), hygienic methods (including microclimate optimization) and technological methods (application of technological solutions) for mitigating emissions from pigs are discussed.
