INTERNATIONAL ELECTRONIC MACHINES CORPORATION — Department of Agriculture SBIR Phase II: 8.12

Description

Active ventilation is energy intensive demanding over twenty percent of a typical farm's electricalneeds. Ventilation practices vary depending on the size of the building specific livestock animalslayout of the building temperature humidity and more. Automated systems on larger farms haveshown significant energy savings but installation and maintenance of new systems is a significantcost to smaller farms.This demonstrates a need for affordable intelligent adaptable retrofittable ventilation systems thancan be tailored to the needs of small to mid-size farms.In Phase I International Electronic Machines Corp (IEM) demonstrated that the CompleteAutonomous Ventilation Environment System (CAVES) for Small Farms was a feasible andpractical solution to these challenges. CAVES is an intelligent customizable scalable adaptablecontrol and ventilation system that monitors key parameters of barn environment - temperaturehumidity vapors/gases including ammonia hydrogen sulfide CO and CO2 -- and combines themwith knowledge of barn size configuration and number and type of livestock to reliably ensureproper ventilation at minimal power usage by actively controlling ventilation fans. CAVES can beretrofitted to existing ventilation fans. Phase I work demonstrated that CAVES could reduce powerdemand by more than 80 percent over standard ventilation operations offering a very quick ROIeven on a small farm.In Phase II IEM will first develop a sensor to verify the energy use and environmental conditionsin small barns and using this data create a Phase II prototype of CAVES to demonstrate thatCAVES is commercially viable as well as physically practical.