• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.8 no.5
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• pp.961-967
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• 2007

Automatic water feeding system for chickens is the one of the most important devices at poultry farms. Chickens drink water directly from a water feeder nipple of the automatic water feeder. Check valve inside the water feeder nipple is open when they drink water and is closed otherwise. There are two types of nipples. One is the piston nipple, and the other is the ball nipple. Because the nipple stick in the ball nipple can move freely, the sloping mechanism of the ball nipple works well. but it has complicated mechanism. On the other hand, the piston nipple has very simple structure, but its movement is limited so it can move only up-and-down. To overcome those limitation, the piston nipple with sphere valve seat face (sphere face piston nipple) has been developed and is just distributed at domestic markets. The experimental performance test of the commercialized sphere piston nipple has been conducted, and compared with the performance of the ball nipple and the piston nipple which are domestic products. As the result, sphere piston nipple shows excellent performance compared to that of the piston nipple but its performance is similar to ball type nipple.