Farmscape for May 13, 2016
A research scientist with PAMI says the next step in the application of hydrovac technology to cleaning swine transport vehicles will be to improve the interface between the cleaning tool and the various surfaces within the trailer.
Researchers with the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute, working on behalf of Swine Innovation Porc, have successfully adapted hydrovac technology, which uses high pressure water and a vacuum to excavate soil from around sensitive underground utilities, to cleaning livestock trailers.
Scientists have been able to cut the time it takes to clean the floor of a livestock trailer to about 40 minutes using less than 150 litres of water.
Dr. Hubert Landry, a research scientist with PAMI, says the next step will be to address the interface between the cleaning tool and the different trailer surfaces.
Clip-Dr. Hubert-Landry Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute:
In a livestock trailer there's a number of obstacles and surface roughness from the anti-slip pattern in the aluminum floor to ribbing in the floor to gate latches, you name it so we certainly need to address that.
We want our cleaning tool to accommodate those obstacles.
We want to make the cleaning tool as surface insensitive as possible.
By doing that we believe that not only will we be successful in the floors but also when cleaning a trailer one has to also clean the walls and the ceiling.
If we achieve the surface insensitive interface we're after we believe that we can then look after walls and ceilings and all surfaces without necessary having to adapt the tool much.
That's the next critical step in reaching the goal.
Dr. Landry says, once that is achieved, researchers will be able to look at the entire system in terms of the hose, the hose reel and the reservoir.
He says all of that will come together on due course but the next critical step will be to work on that tool to surface interface.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.
*Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork