Abstract
The domestic duck industry is the sixth-largest among the livestock industries. However, 34.3% of duck houses were the duck houses arbitrarily converted from plastic greenhouses. This type of duck house was difficult to properly manage internal air temperature and humidity environment. Humidity environment inside duck houses is an important factor that directly affects the productivity and disease occurrence of the duck. Although the humidity environments of litters (bedding materials) affect directly the inside environment of duck houses, there are only few studies related to humidity environment of litters. In this study, evaporation rates from litters were evaluated according to air temperature, relative humidity, water contents of litters, and wind speed. The experimental chamber was made to measure evaporation rates from litters. Temperature and humidity controlled chamber was utilized during the conduct of the laboratory experiments. Using the measured data, a multi linear regression analysis was carried out to derive the calculation formula of evaporation rates from litters. In order to improve the accuracy of the multi linear regression model, the partial vapor pressure directly related to evaporation was also considered. Variance inflation factors of air temperature, relative humidity, partial vapor pressure, water contents of litters, and wind speed were calculated to identify multicollinearity problem. The Multiple $R^2$ and adjusted-$R^2$ of regression model were calculated at 0.76 and 0.71, respectively. Therefore, the regression models were developed in this study can be used to estimate evaporation rates from the litter of duck houses.
