Research Demonstrates Effectiveness of Hydrovac in Cleaning Swine Transport Trailers
On behalf of Swine Innovation Pork the University of Saskatchewan, the Prairie Swine Centre, VIDO-Intervac and the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute are working on a project aimed at reducing the time and the cost of washing and disinfecting swine transportation equipment and ultimately automating the system.Dr Terry Fonstad, a Professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan, says pilot testing has demonstrated the effectiveness of the initial prototype.
Dr Terry Fonstad-University of Saskatchewan:
At this point it's a bunch of nozzles and some hoses but it's proved to be quite effective.
If you can imagine in your head what a carpet cleaner looks like, with a nozzle that sprays down onto your carpet and then a suction hose that sucks that up right away and so that's kind of the same thing except that it's an industrial size.
PAMI has developed a nozzle head that would clean the bottom of the trailer that looks almost exactly like that.
Once you've got everything sucked out you take this five head nozzle with the suction line and clean the bottom of the trailer.
The pilot testing that we did with just the floor cleaning, PAMI felt that they could get down to probably cleaning the decks of a 53 foot trailer in 40 minutes with less than 200 litres of water and it was all contained when it was done.
The next thing would be to design other tools that would be needed to do edges and crevices and sides and roofs and those kind of things and then put the complete system together with a hose reel and be able to clean that trailer manually with these nozzles and hoses and hose reels in the event then that once you could do that the next step would be then to automate it.
Dr Fonstad says, once the trailer is clean, if it can be heated to 70 degrees in a safe manner for a specific amount of time it would then be safe to use immediately.
He says the hope is to have a manual system developed and proof of pathogen kill by the end of this year.