Sous vide a whole chicken : temp/time?
This is a very crude estimate:

If you have a 1kg chicken cooked straight out of the fridge at 2C to 65C, and assume that the chicken has thermal properties of water (near enough given that it is 70% water give or take), you need roughly 265kJ.

Heat transfer is limited by surface area and thickness of the chicken. If we approximate the chicken as a cylinder with say 150cm length and 10cm diameter, with a total surface area of 628 sq-cm, the average heat transfer rate for the temperature range is around 24W. So, it would take 11,141 seconds (or 186 min or just over 3 hours) to move 265kJ from the water into the chicken to bring it up to 65C.

If the chicken were fully immersed in water without a bag, heat transfer would be much quicker since the cavity will also be filled with hot water and the path length is roughly 1/4 of the bagged chicken. So, expect cooking time to roughly fall by 3/4.



thermal properties assumed: Cp 4.2 J/g/K, conductivity 0.6 J/s/m/K