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).
\(p_{H_{2}O}=\frac{\text{RH}{{\ *\ \ p}^{*}}_{H_{2}O}}{100\%}\)