On tray egg refiling systems & contactless upside down detection

NECTRA has developed an award-winning innovation (at Eurotier 2021) called "SMART" for hatching egg REFILLING.
Rolling the eggs is the way hatching eggs get processed today. Currently hatching eggs collected from Farms can only be collected by being rolled over on belt conveying System. The eggs from different source are all rolling on the same conveyor until they get processed, separated by weighed, and packed small end down (air chamber up) into setter trays to be incubated.

In very large companies, with large number of farms (often in Asia but not only) it is preferred to process all the eggs in a processing center where eggs from various farms are brought on egg trays, unloaded onto a conveyor and start rolling to be processed.

This collection system poses several inconveniences due to the fact that:

• Eggs get micro crack by hitting each other’s which reduces hatchability and increase contamination
• Since thousands of eggs pass on these conveyors and each of them would roll hundreds time on the belt with extensive rubbing from eggs shell to egg shell and from eggs shell to conveyors, they can and do become extremely contaminated with a high risk of shared contamination.
• If breeders flocks get older or if the shell quality get fragile eggs break more easily and any leak from a broken egg will quickly dirty the belt which in turn will stain the shell of many good eggs.
• Also modern genetic have made the egg so round that it is difficult even with automated machine that roll eggs to identify the small end from the large end with the egg chamber; Therefore for broiler, the amount of eggs collected upside-down have become quite important and even automatic packers for hatching eggs show errors of 2 to 3% of eggs packed upside-down ... that goes undetected through the incubation process and affect the hatchability rate.

This technology allows empty egg position randomly shared within a tray to be filled up automatically at high speed and in one single deposit regardless of how many eggs need to be refilled and regardless of their random repartition. Therefore, EGG CAN BE TRANSFERRED from any type of farm egg trays into any other type of incubation trays in a fast manners regardless of whether the two trays match of not.