Ventilation design with partial air cleaning

If air cleaning is too expensive, the poultry industry will just move to countries or regions with less strict environmental regulation. For the farmers it would be much too expensive to clean all the exhausted air from a poultry house. The key to get a realistic air cleaning solution in the poultry industry is to combine the MAC with “Partial air cleaning”. But what is Partial air cleaning?”

Definition

In many regions with intensive animal production the ventilation rate is only running at maximum capacity for a limited number of hours a year. On most days, only a few of the fans are running most of the year. If you clean the air from these few fans, you will clean all the air from the livestock building most of the hours during a year. 

When you install partial air cleaning in a house, the first few fans that are turned on are the only fans which use the cleaning system.

Example

As an example we can take a layer house in Denmark. If the desired room temperature inside a house is 21^oC and the total ventilation capacity is 10m³/h per bird, the ventilation will be running under 20% of full ventilation capacity for 40% of the yearly running time. This means that if you install an air cleaner in this house, which cleans the first 20% of the exhausted air; all of the air in the building will pass through the air cleaner for 40% of the yearly running time. This is illustrated in the figure below.

By cleaning the first 20% of the exhausted air from a layer house, with a cleaning efficiency of 80%, we will remove around 58% of the total amount of nitrogen that is normally discharged through the outlets fans. For example, if a layer house with 13,000 birds has an ammonia emission through the exhaust fans of 3560kg, the air cleaner can remove 2060kg ammonia. The removed ammonia is collected in a tank and can be used as fertilizer.

Distributors

In general, strict ammonia emission regulations are not good for the farmers and Munters, because they limit the amount of animals in certain areas, and in turn the amount of ventilation equipment we can sell.  The development of the air cleaner has been done in order to help farmers enlarge their production facilities in areas where laws prevent growth because of high ammonia levels. The MAC combined with “partial air cleaning” is a great way to get an economic realistic solution to this issue.

 If you would like to get further information of the benefits of the MAC combined with partial air cleaning in your local climate do not hesitate to contact Merete Lyngbye at Munters Denmark. Merete has access to weather information all over the world and together with the local sales team she can help you to calculate the ammonia reduction for your local climate conditions.