Mitigating Heat Stress through the Application of Radiant Cooling

Heat stress in livestock, now a major economic burden for farmers, will only get worse as the intensity of heat stress events continues to increaseif mitigating measures are not aggressively pursued. One industry expert estimates the $36 B swine industry incurs heat-stress losses of $900 M per year. Comparable heat-stress losses are borne by the other segments of the livestock industry.Our technical solution to mitigating heat stress will focus on animals raised indoors, where our technology's performance and economic benefits are most compelling. In these applications, heat stress is now addressed mostly with enhanced ventilation (e.g., tunnel ventilation with air velocities reaching 2 m/s) with or without some form of evaporative cooling.Unfortunately for the meat-producing industry, enhanced ventilation combined with evaporative cooling will become less effective as ambient temperature and humidity increase. Perhaps more importantly, these approaches to cooling can adversely affect animal health: filtration is never perfect and high ventilation rates can expose a herd to airborne pathogens; evaporative cooling increases indoor relative humidity, which if levels exceed 70%, partly negates the benefit of temperature reduction and, more importantly, promotes the growth of mold and fungi.The preceding limitations for enhanced ventilation and evaporative cooling can be avoided by radiantly cooling animals. Radiant cooling has been explored as a more efficient means to keep people comfortable indoors and outdoors.Although our discussions with both researchers and facility operators within the swine industry have not identified past work to radiantly cool swine or other animals, we will demonstrate the potential for this novel approach to become a highly effective and low costapproach to avoiding heat stress in sows and other confined animals.Our project will focus on mitigating heat stress of sows in gestation barns. This focused application has extremely high value ($450 M of the $900 M annual loss for heat stress in the swine industry to breeding facilities), which makes it an ideal entry application where our technology can prove its cost-effectiveness before expanding into the broader livestock market.