A Sustainable Approach for Improving Air Quality in a Poultry House

This research investigated the performance and efficiency of a crossflow dew point indirect evaporative cooling system (CDP-IEC) inside a pen of 50hens in a poultry house. The simulated pen is modeled so that it has four external walls of 3m (9.84 ft) height and a floor area of 2.7m (8.86 ft) ×3.3m (10.83 ft). A CDP-IEC that can bring air to lower temperatures was proposed based on the principle of the Maisotsenko cycle (M-cycle)for the purpose of implementing the system at a case study of poultry house located at the Agriculture Research and Education Center (AREC) at theAmerican University of Beirut in the Beqaa Valley, Lebanon.A simplified model was developed for the CDP-IEC based on mass and energy balances. The supply air was cooled through the dry channel whereits temperature was lowered by water evaporation that occurs inside the adjacent wet channel. Part of it was extracted as the product air while theremaining portion was employed as the working air to perform the evaporative cooling in the wet channel. However, the apparatus was designed forsummer conditions to maintain CO2 concentration below 2500ppm, relative humidity around 60% and ammonia (NH3) concentrations below25ppm as recommended by ASABE and ASHRAE.The proposed sustainable interventions to improve air quality in the poultry house was directly implemented on a case study of poultry house insemi-arid climate of Beqaa. Simulations carried out by implementing a code that models the space where the proposed ventilation system was deployedeffectively to deliver the cooling needs and fresh air requirements. The system performance was analyzed and compared to a conventional direct evaporativecooling system. Consequently, the crossflow indirect evaporative cooler maintained the pen temperature between 22.72-25.5 °C (72.9-77.9 °??) ofrelative humidity below 60% with 40.105 % energy savings while the direct evaporative cooler increased the humidity inside the pen to approximately88%.