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Abstract.

Modern hog farrowing operations have reached a state in which the environmental conditions necessary for piglets are vastly different than those required by sows. A hog-cooling pad has been developed by Purdue University researchers to alleviate thermally-induced stress in the sow. Understanding the basic thermal properties of the device is critical to the development of the technology, and this article documents the experimentation performed on the unit to measure some of those characteristics. A preliminary experimental investigation into the thermal response of the device with no external heat loading under a variety of coolant flow and temperatures is presented. The sow-cooling panel reacts as a Newtonian convective device and provides a uniform top surface temperature. The results indicate that device is highly conductive to the top panel and reasonably well insulated from the environment.