TECHNICAL COLUMN
PolAIR high pressure cooling Due to climate change resulting in longer periods of hot weather, it has become more important to more effectively cool poultry sheds. Growers have a responsibility to provide positive animal-welfare conditions, and over-heated birds are unhappy and unproductive.
There are several options available to control the shed climate, the most popular are pad cooling and high pressure fogging. While both use the same principle of evaporative cooling, there are considerable economic benefits to fogging. The high pressure fogging system itself is a lot more affordable and requires less seasonal maintenance, giving growers a return on their investment in as little as one heatwave. High pressure fogging systems atomize water to a fine fog which evaporates, cooling down the air. With this adiabatic process, the warmth in the air evaporates the fog, lowering the air temperature and raising the relative humidity. In Western Europe, the fresh incoming air is often humid because it is carrying water picked up from the sea.
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This means that it may not be able to cool as needed by passing through a pad cooling system. After incoming air warms up inside the barn, it can hold more water and makes utilizing a high pressure fogging system to provide the evaporative cooling more effective in our climates. During warm periods, the naturally low relative humidity allows the air to absorb moisture through fogging and that moisture will not cause respiratory problems or make the litter wet because the relative humidity will remain below 80%. The lowering of relative humidity when air is warmed inside the barn is important because then the air can absorb and expel the humidity produced by the chickens and the high pressure fogging system that cools their environment.
