Water vapour conductance of eggs during incubation
ONE incubates eggs at a constant temperature of 35.5°C and maintains
humidity constant at about 60%. As part of their protocol eggs are
weighted upon arrival and before hatching, to account for excessive
water loss. Using this information, we calculated the water vapour
conductance of the eggs under these circumstances, with the intention of
obtaining a value of water vapour conductance of the whole egg in
addition to the water vapour conductance of individual eggshell
fragments. We used the relative humidity equation to correct for these
conditions and calculated the partial pressure in the artificial
incubator, thus calculating the pressure difference across the eggshells
(considering that the pressure difference is 23.77 Torr in 0%
humidity).
\(p_{H_{2}O}=\frac{\text{RH}{{\ *\ \ p}^{*}}_{H_{2}O}}{100\%}\)