Emergency depopulation of chicken farms during an avian influenza outbreak (Design and development of extraction system)

• Main Author: Lau, Samuel Teck Wah
• Other Authors: Heng Kok Hui
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/71651
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With the continual threat of the highly infectious Avian Influenza (AI) disease outbreak, it is important that the countries be prepared to handle such the outbreak situation. In Singapore, there are two millions of chickens, housed in three farms. The chickens will have to be depopulated within 24 hours once the flock is identified with the contagious virus. Chickens in Singapore were layer-cage reared due to the limited land size. Depopulating layer-cage flocks require the cullers to manually extract and remove the spent hens from the cages. Coupled with the Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), the cullers are required to be in an asymmetric and twisted posture in order to remove the chickens from the cages. As such, there is a need for a better system. While the current market has developed many equipment for extracting chickens, there is no one solution that is capable of performing both floor and layer-cage reared flocks extraction process. To address the issue, several designs were developed to improve chicken extraction process on layer-cage using the guidelines of engineering design process. Through research, planning, analysis and Solidworks drawings, a mockup system was fabricated. The mockup system was tested and results showed that the system improved the rate of removing spent hens from the cages by eliminating postural stress and improve the method of transferring chickens from cage and onto the slide. As such, the concept could aid the depopulation of chicken farms in Singapore in the event of an AI outbreak.