Design and implementation of multi-channel land fowls stunner with current sharing controller

This paper presents an intelligent humane stunner for a multi-channel poultry stunning system with current sharing features. This proposed system consists of an interleaved buck-boost converter for driving the stunning system, a full bridge inverter for generating the stunning voltage, a half bridge inverter for generating dither voltages to expedite the breakdown of skin impedance, and a current sharing controller for providing uniform current to each channel of the stunning system. Hence, the slaughtering quantities of poultry can be increased, and also can reduce poultry stress and improve carcass quality during stunning interval. In this paper, a multi-channel poultry stunning system with ±160 V stunning voltage and 320 W output power is implemented for verifying its performance. Experimental results shown that the proposed stunning system can raise 10% more coma effectiveness over the one without current sharing algorithm, thus improve carcass quality. Hence, with this approach, fewer components are needed to achieve the better performance, resulting in a multi-channel poultry stunning system with lighter weight and smaller size.