Poultry Neck Guide Positioning for Slaughter Completeness
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing poultry slaughtering installations have a high rate of live poultry entering scalding and defeathering processes, leading to inefficiencies and animal welfare concerns due to incomplete killing, primarily caused by high conveyance speed and ineffective neck positioning, resulting in manual post-cutting requirements.
Innovation Solution
The slaughtering installation employs advanced poultry positioning and cutting mechanisms, including neck guides and cutting means that ensure precise orientation and cutting of blood vessels, with a back-up killing device to address incomplete kills, ensuring all poultry are humanely killed before scalding and defeathering.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If high conveyance speed is used to increase productivity, then processing throughput is improved, but killing completeness deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action by positioning the poultry neck region between guide bars before the cutting knife engages, ensuring the neck is properly oriented and stretched in advance. This preliminary positioning allows the cutting knife to effectively open blood vessels even at high conveyance speeds, resolving the contradiction between productivity and killing completeness.
Solution Approach 2:
The guide bars serve as intermediary elements between the conveying assembly and the cutting knife. These guide bars mediate the interaction by stretching and positioning the neck region, ensuring proper alignment of blood vessels with the cutting knife blade, thereby maintaining killing effectiveness at high speeds.
2Device complexity
If conventional positioning means are used, then device complexity is reduced, but neck positioning precision deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the essential positioning function from complex mechanical positioning means and implements it through simple guide bars that are part of the conveying assembly structure. This extraction maintains positioning precision while minimizing device complexity by using straightforward guiding elements rather than complex positioning mechanisms.
3Reliability
If manual post-cut is implemented to ensure complete killing, then killing completeness is improved, but productivity deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies self-service by designing the conveying assembly and cutting device to automatically and reliably kill all poultry without requiring manual intervention. The guide bars and cutting knife work together to ensure complete blood vessel opening for every bird, making the system self-sufficient and eliminating the need for manual post-cutting operations.
Data Source
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AI summary
The present invention relates to a slaughtering installation for processing poultry which installation is adapted to be used in combination with a conveying assembly (40) for conveying poultry which is suspended from their legs in a transport direction T. The slaughtering installation comprising a killing device with poultry positioning means for positioning the neck region of the poultry suspended from the conveying assembly, the killing device further comprising cutting means for cutting into the neck and thereby opening at least one blood vessel in the neck region of the poultry. According to the invention, the positioning means comprise a back neck guide (54) along which the back side of the neck of the poultry is guided, and a breast neck guide (53) along which the breast side of the neck of the poultry is guided.