Experimental trials of ratites skinning in order to fix plant and mechanical solutions

Theoretical analysis of skinning process has been carried out, and an automatic measurement system in order to record the drawing-force on the animal’s body during skinning tests, has been designed. Moreover, some mechanical criteria have been fixed to design specific skinning machines or adapt cattle skinning machines to ostrich slaughtering. Experimental results partially confirm theoretical analysis; they point out that the angle of inclination of drawing-force with back-line is a parameter which mostly influences the value of drawing-force and that this influence tends to increase as the angle is near to 90° or exceeds this limit. In any case, the applied drawing-force must not exceed 300,0 daN. Therefore ostrich skinning should be done with vertical-drawing machines and the animal should be suspended by its wings at the track walking beam, in relation to their anatomy structure and the tensile strength of the hide. In the case of low working capacity (8-10 heads per hour) the animal could be skinned suspended by the legs, considering some limitations pointed out during experimental trials.