Solving dehydration losses in an air chill tunnel

By Roy Winters, representative of  IWC-International in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

With one of my customers here in the UK I spent many years and conversations introducing the Undine® technique to them. As with many new techniques not seen here in the UK, Undine® almost seemed too good to be true to the many companies I spoke to. Thankfully, for me I made contact with two managers in Hygiene and Production who could see the benefits of Undine®. After initial trials and installations with some of our other products the conversation turned to other ways they could use Undine®. I quickly pointed them in the direction of dehydration losses.

By reducing dehydration losses companies could make huge yield savings. For a line running at 15,000 birds per hour, every 0.1% loss could equate to a loss of 100,000 euros annually. This product had already proved very successful in Europe, we had plenty of data to back up the product and the science behind why it was so effective. With the numbers we mentioned, this customer was easily convinced.  

They installed 14 units which involved adding our bi-turbo’s between the incoming water supply, their existing moistening units and adding air supply. This was an easy installation which was done by their engineers on site. This was quoted within a week of the installation to me via email- “With regards to the bi-turbo performance I have included the results below of what we are seeing and think you are underselling it at a 0.1% improvement as we have seen better than that!”

We are supremely confident of how Undine performs, so when we quoted a 0.1% improvement, we knew we would outperform that- this is obviously great news to the customer as well.

The Blue being after install of the IWC equipment, orange the results before installation. As you can see there is an improvement of the results:

• Average 0.3% less de hydration losses.
• Because of the improved skin coverage, the results are not only less losses, but also a smaller deviation to the average.

Our knowledge base article on moistening in air chill tunnels provides more technical background info on the solutions.