Cloud-based data management system for automatic real-time data acquisition from large-scale laying-hen farms

Management of poultry farms in China mostly relies on manual labor.Since such a large amount of valuable data for the production process either are saved incomplete or saved only as paper documents,making it very difficult for data retrieve,processing and analysis.An integrated cloud-based data management system(CDMS)was proposed in this study,in which the asynchronous data transmission,distributed file system,and wireless network technology were used for information collection,management and sharing in large-scale egg production.The cloud-based platform can provide information technology infrastructures for different farms.The CDMS can also allocate the computing resources and storage space based on demand.A real-time data acquisition software was developed,which allowed farm management staff to submit reports through website or smartphone,enabled digitization of production data.The use of asynchronous transfer in the system can avoid potential data loss during the transmission between farms and the remote cloud data center.All the valid historical data of poultry farms can be stored to the remote cloud data center,and then eliminates the need for large server clusters on the farms.Users with proper identification can access the online data portal of the system through a browser or an APP from anywhere worldwide.

Effect of cooling pad installation on indoor airflow distribution in a tunnel-ventilated laying-hen house

Extra cooling pads on the sidewalls are needed for larger poultry houses using tunnel ventilation system.Preliminary study showed that the airflow velocity going through different aisles varies greatly when the extra pads are installed at the end of sidewalls,making a“[”-shape air inlet.Combined with field tests,the CFD(computational fluid dynamics)technology was used to study the uniformity of airflow distribution in a tunnel-ventilated laying-hen house.The air distribution was first monitored in a layer house to find the main reason resulting in the variations of airflows in different aisles.Then CFD simulations were carried out with different distances(D=2 m,3 m or 4 m)between the pads on end-wall and the extra pads on side walls.The field test showed that airflow streams from the different groups of cooling pads collided vertically at the house corners,mixed with each other,then flew towards the center of the house.This was the main reason that the wind speed in the middle aisle was much higher than in other aisles,leaving large zones of lower ventilation in the aisles adjacent to the sidewalls.The results of CFD simulations indicated that air distributions could be significantly improved when the extra pieces of pads were moved away for an appropriate distance from the end coolingpads.As far as conventional poultry house with a span of 12 m,the air speeds in different aisles were more uniform when this distance was about 3 m.