A novel system for ammonia gas control in broiler production environment

Abstract

The broiler production in Brazil has been worldwide prominence, and it is fundamental for the development of the Brazilian economy. Chickens are intensively raised and confined into aviaries, in which all broilers are the same age and genetic origin. Most poultry farmers reuse the poultry manure for several consecutive batches in order to reduce costs. However, this practice can increase humidity and ammonia production. The excess of ammonia gas causes stress and diseases in broilers. Consequently, broiler production can be reduced and cause losses to poultry farmers. For this reason, the continuous monitoring of ammonia gas concentration in aviaries is necessary. Therefore, the cost of commercially available devices for the accomplishment of this task is considered high. In this work, a low-cost prototype for the monitoring of Ammonia gas in aviaries was developed. To do so, the NodeMCU module was used to measure, through sensors, the Ammonia gas concentration and send real-time information to an Android mobile application, which is available to poultry farmer. The data processed by the NodeMCU is sent to a Spring Boot server and stored into a cloud database. Also, the user can receive notifications when the Ammonia level is higher than a tolerated limit. As a result, the cost for the prototype development was approximately US$ 30.00, considering only hardware components. In this, our prototype can be popularized among poultry farmers for a more affordable price concerning other commercially available devices