Ammonia is a very important atmospheric pollutant. Agricultural activities, livestock production in particular, have been reported to be the largest contributor of ammonia emissions into the atmosphere. Accurate estimation of ammonia emission rate from individual operations or sources is important and yet a challenging task for both regulatory agencies and animal producers. The overall research objective of this study was to develop an emission model which can be used to estimate ammonia emission from broiler litter. In the reported model, the ammonia flux is essentially a function of the litter's total ammoniacal nitrogen (TAN) content, moisture content, pH, and temperature, as well as the Freundlich partition coefficient (Kf), mass transfer coefficient (KG), ventilation rate (Q), and emission surface area (A). A dynamic flow-through chamber system and a wind tunnel were designed to measure ammonia fluxes from broiler litter. The dynamic flow-through chamber experiments evaluated the reported model with various litter samples under a constant temperature and wind profile. The wind tunnel experiments evaluated the reported model under various temperatures and wind profiles. Model parameters such as Kf and KG were estimated. The results from the two experiments were consistent with each other. The estimated KG ranged from 1.11 to 27.64 m h-1, and the estimated Kf ranged from 0.56 to 4.48 L kg-1. Regression sub-models were developed to estimate Kf as a function of litter pH and temperature and to estimate KG as a function of air velocity and temperature. Sensitivity analysis of the model showed that ammonia flux is very sensitive to litter pH and to a lesser extent temperature. A validation metric based on the mean and covariance in the measurement and in the model parameters were used to validate the ammonia emission model in the presence of measurement and model parameter uncertainties.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NCSU/oai:NCSU:etd-11062009-125531 |
| Date | 03 December 2009 |
| Creators | Liu, Zifei |
| Contributors | Peter Bloomfield, Sanjay Shah, David Beasley, Lingjuan Wang |
| Publisher | NCSU |
| Source Sets | North Carolina State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/theses/available/etd-11062009-125531/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dis sertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to NC State University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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