Recent development in Solar Powered Poultry Egg incubator (Researches)

The importance of a sustainable and environmentally friendly energy supply resource in poultry
chick production cannot be overstated. Such energy resource measures should be interesting and easily
obtained by nature, such as solar energy. A unique aspect of a solar-powered incubator is that it can use
photovoltaic materials to harness sun energy. It can be used in both rural and urban poultry operations.
The creation of small, medium, and large-scale commercial incubator using solar powered chicken egg
incubators could lead to a pollution-free environment, systems that are free of fire threats, and the
development of small, medium, and large-scale commercial incubator (Demissie, 2020).

(Shilpa et al., 2020) designed and constructed a solar-powered incubator that consisted of
power supply, temperature controller, and the incubator. The power supply comprised of solar panel,
charge controller and battery and an off-the-shelf temperature controller with a model of DTH-966 was
utilized to monitor the temperature and humidity inside the incubator. The incubator has the capacity of
fifty chicken eggs and 44-watt LED bulbs was used as heater. In addition, to control the temperature the
bulbs were turned on when the temperature reads below 36 degrees Celsius and turned off when it
reads 39 degrees Celsius.

(Osanyinpeju, 2018) developed a solar-powered poultry egg incubator with the main
components of incubating chamber, control system and solar powered system. The developed solar
incubator was 610 mm × 607 mm × 1649 mm in size with a capacity for 150 eggs and the sizes of the
solar panels, charge controller, batteries and inverter power designed and used were 480 W, 40 A, 400
AH and 2 kW, respectively. In addition, the temperature control system was composed of thermostat for
reading the interior temperature of the incubator and a hygro-thermometer clock and sensor to
measures the ambient or the temperature outside the incubator.

(Agbo et al., 2018) worked on a solar powered automated incubator system to provide solar
energy and to operate mostly in remote areas where there are no sources of electricity. The prototype
was fully automated using PIC18f4550 as the main component of the temperature control system that
controls all the processes that includes the opening and closing of the valve to sensing of the
temperature and humidity, displaying the temperature and humidity values on seven segments, the
turning of the egg tray, and powering of the fan.

(Uzodinma et al., 2020) presented the performance evaluation of a hybrid solar powered poultry
egg incubator at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka which includes the physical and biological testing of
the incubator. The prototype is said to be a hybrid system because it has two sources of heat energy for
incubation. One is from the hot air from the solar collector into the chamber and the other is heat from
hot air is increased by two DC 15-Watts tungsten electric bulbs powered by a Photovoltaic (PV) module.

(Krishna et al., 2019) designed a cost-effective and user-friendly system to reduce cost involved
in the hatcheries in remote rural area. The feature of this system that differs from another solar
powered incubator is that it is a fully automatic incubator system with real-time alert system that
utilized GSM module and buzzer. The incubator system automatically regulates the required
specification such as temperature, humidity, ventilation, angular position, and other important factors
for successful hatchability. In addition, the system is composed of several components like solar panel,
charge controller and battery for its power supply. Microprocessor was used to control the 80-watt lamp
as heater for desired temperature, DC fan for ventilation, water sprinkler for desired humidity, and DC
motor to change the angular position of the egg tray inside the chamber. Also, temperature sensor,
humidity sensor, oxygen level detector was also used to monitor the physical variable for necessary and
desired condition for incubation.

(Tsamaase & Motshidisi, 2019) constructed a solar powered incubator for areas with potential
chicken farming but without access to electricity grid. The incubator chamber carried a capacity of forty
chicken eggs and built using locally acquired materials. The prototype consisted of DC bulbs as source of
the heat for incubation and DC humidifying fan for rapid water evaporation in water pan to increase the
humidity. To monitor the temperature and humidly, ZL-SHR04 temperature and humidity sensor was
used. DC motor connected to an actuator was utilized to tilt the egg tray at an angel of 45 degrees for
better egg incubation. Among the previous studies, this incubator has a unique feature that displays the
number of days left before the hatching.

(Paras Jr., 2020) developed and implemented a solar heat assisted egg incubation system that
provided the poultry egg industry with a suitable technology for small to medium scale production. The
prototype was used for an efficient energy system to partially incubate duck eggs for a specific delicacy
in the Philippines. In addition, a flat plate solar heat collector was utilized to increase the heat that was
required for incubator with a capacity of 10,000 duck eggs. The system is efficient with a 72.6% electrical
energy conservation for the incubation.

Recent Development in Poultry Egg Fertility Detection (Researches)

Early fertility detection is the most serious issue that the egg incubation industry faces. For the
discrimination process, more advanced technologies are required for fertility detection. If infertile eggs
are not removed before being placed in an artificial incubator or hatcher, they can cause bio-
contamination, as well as waste time, space, and money (Abdallah et al., 2018). For hatcheries and hen
breeding farms, egg hatchability is a significant economic consideration. Many variables influence it,
including breeder flock problems, fertility, egg management, and so on. Non-hatchable eggs are
detected early, alerting hatcheries to their presence. These will save them time, incubator space,
handling costs, and a variety of other things (Rancapan et al., 2019).

(Tolentino et al., 2019) proposed an automatic candling system that identify infertile egg using
basic image acquisition with crank-rocker mechanism for egg turning. Its automatic candling program
has a speed of 1.129 seconds, and the incubator's performance was ideal at 36 degrees Celsius, with
humidity between 40 and 60 percent, with an optimal level of 50 percent. Finally, utilizing the proposed
system, the hatch rate percentage of incubation is 69.44 percent, while the percentage accuracy result
for recognizing fertile eggs is 91.43 percent.

(Koodtalang et al., 2020) designed and implemented a non-destructive fertility detection system
for multiple chicken eggs in incubation industry based on image processing technique. The system
utilized an LED light source setting up for illumining the 48 eggs, consisting of both egg types and
randomly placed on a tray in dark box. In addition, Python, OpenCV and Keras were used to
programmed the designed system that showed the accuracies for fertile incubated eggs detection
between day 7 and day 9.

(Rancapan et al., 2019) proposed a study using image processing and fuzzy logic for egg fertility
detection. The system utilized the programming and fuzzy logic toolbox of the MATLAB software. In
addition, the study used the k-nearest neighbor clustering algorithm for the determining the fertility
rate and used sixty sample of chicken eggs with the egg sphericity, area and perimeter as the
parameters. The models used for the system was quite beneficial for quickly and accurately classifying
the fertility of chicken eggs images. The results of the study revealed that image processing, fuzzy logic,
and K-nearest neighbor can be used to assess the fertility rate of chicken eggs.

(Geng et al., 2019) proposed a technique in detecting fertility of hatching eggs based on heart
rate threshold. The heartbeat signal of a 9-day later hatching eggs were collected and preprocessed
using the designed Butterworth high-pass filter. The heart rate threshold was classified into two domain,
one is time domain and the other is frequency domain resulted in a two classification algorithm. The
designed algorithm in this study is capable of detecting the fertility of hatching eggs with a detection
accuracy of up to 98.11 percent based on the experimental results.

(Abdallah et al., 2018) developed a low-cost device with advanced statistical classifiers to detect
the fertility of hatching eggs. The system is composed of light dependent resistor sensors interfaced with
a computer programmed using LabView software. In addition, classification mathematical models were
developed in this study based from mathematical formulas to execute a control decision to detect if the
egg is hatchable or not.

(Diantoro & Santoso, 2017) developed a classification of egg fertility for Kampong chicken egg
using frequency distribution feature and Naïve Bayes classifier. There were 350 eggs in total, which were
employed in this study and 250 data points in the training set, with 125 viable egg image data and 125
infertile egg image data. In addition, for data analysis, 100 data, 50 data images of fertilized eggs, and 50
data images of infertile eggs were used.

Recent development in Spectroscopy

(Khaliduzzaman et al., 2021) conducted an experiment that detect the grade of hatchlings using
Near-Infrared spectroscopy. The experiment used a ROSS 308 egg, a broiler breed and a nondestructive
spectroscopic absorbance method used to measure the vital signals of all incubated eggs. The spectral
acquisition system is composed of light source, spectrometer and a computer. From day 8 to day 18,
after taking the eggs out of the incubator once a day, the vital signals of all incubated eggs were
measured using an NIR sensor. After the measurement, the eggs were immediately returned to the
incubator to reduce the amount of time they were exposed to the outside environment.

(Michalczyk & Kurczab, 2018) investigated the use of Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR)
Spectroscopy to assessed the freshness of poultry eggs. The main goal of this study was to look into
using Attenuated Total Reflection Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (ATR FTIR) and other
chemometric approaches to classify eggs based on the laying hen method and to discover changes in
individual egg components throughout storage. In total, 50 eggs were used in the investigation, with 10
eggs allocated to each of the five classes: 0, 1, 2, 3, and rural. Eggs were held for a total of 29 days,
which was divided into ten measuring days, during which one egg from each class was examined by
recording two FTIR spectra for the shell, albumen, and yolk.

Recent Development in Smart Poultry Incubator