ASABE Technical Library - Abstract

Abstract.

Among the challenges involving the poultry industry, the thermal environment stands out, as unsuitable conditions result in a decrease in the welfare of the birds, weakening the productive performance. The enthalpy (H) has been proposed to assess the internal environment of the sheds in broilers raising. By definition, H is a physical variable that indicates the amount of energy contained in a mixture of water vapor and dry air (kJ kg^{-1dry air}).Given the above, the aim of the present work was to analyze the structure and the magnitude of the H spatial variability, using geostatistics tools such as semivariogram analysis and also producing kriging maps. The experiment was conducted in the west mesoregion of the states of Minas Gerais, Brazil, in a commercial broiler house with heating system consisting of two furnaces that heat the air indirectly, in the firsts 7 days of the birds’ life. The data were registered at intervals of five minutes in the period from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. The variables were evaluated by semivariograms fitted by residual maximum likelihood (REML). Kriging maps were generated based on the model used to fit the semivariogram. It was possible to characterize the variability of the H, which allowed observing the spatial dependence by using geostatistics techniques. In addition, the use of geostatistics and spatial distribution maps made possible to identify problems in the thermal environment in regions inside the broiler house that may harm the development of chicks.