Design and Fabrication of Low-Cost Incubator to Evaluate Hatching Performance of Egg

Abstract

In this study, a poultry egg incubator was designed, fabricated, and tested to evaluate its hatching performance. The incubator consists of a microcontroller with egg turner trays and incubating chamber of 116 nos. of egg capacity. The hatchability of the developed incubator was 79.3% and 87.1% hatchability during manual and automatic trials respectively. The temperature in the developed incubator was within the acceptable incubation temperature ranges from 37.6 °C to 38.6 °C. The average relative humidity in the developed incubator was maintained at 63.6% at manual and 55-65% at automatic trial. The eggs were turned manually approximately at 6 hours of interval. On the other hand, in the automatically controlled trial, it was done by egg turner maintaining exactly 6 hours of interval. It is noted that the percentage of hatching in rice husk incubators is below 55% which is much below comparing with the developed incubator. Also, the newborn chickens in rice husk incubators are unhealthy as they don’t get a sufficient amount of heat. Besides, in the sand incubation technique, kerosene-based hurricane lamps are used which produce Carbon Dioxide. The developed incubator is environment friendly because it doesn’t produce any by-product that is responsible for harming the environment. Also, after the successful trials, we have found the benefit-cost ratio was 1.42 which was quite satisfactory. The egg incubator can maintain the optimum conditions for the hatching of the chicken eggs and is capable of incubating and hatching the chicken eggs effectively. If the developed incubator is commercially supplied to the end-user, it will be a beneficial process of hatching for the farmer of Bangladesh.