Design and prototyping of a low-cost, energy efficient eggs incubator in developing countries: A case study of Cameroon

Farming in general and poultry in particular is a back bone to Africa's development and self-sufficient in term of food. However, in a country like Cameroon, traditional poultry accounts for more than 70%. Due to this situation, more than 43% of newly hatched chicks do not survive thereby causing a lot of loss both financially and in terms of availability of chicken as food. This paper aims to bring a solution to this problem. The paper deals with the prototyping of an energy efficient eggs incubator in view of providing a solution to the poultry sector in developing countries. The system hardware is composed of an enclosure, mechanical and electronic parts. The enclosure is made of plywood, aluminum and glass wool in order to minimize the heat loss across the multi-layered wall. The mechanical part comprises of electronically controlled mechanical jacks. The electronic module is constituted of a temperature and humidity generator and measurement circuits, a control circuit, a communication module and a microcontroller in charge of monitoring and controlling the operation of the system. Using Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller, the mathematical modeling of heat transfer permitted the optimization of energy efficiency of the system. The system has a capacity of 600 eggs. The eggs were incubated at a temperature of 37.5°C and a humidity of 45.5% after a preheating stage of 30 min. The developed incubator system gave a hatching rate of 87.27%.