Objective
At present technology exists to grow marine fish in intensive recirculating systems in which excess ammonia is removed by bacterial nitrification. There are also bacterial denitrification systems in use in freshwater aquaculture to remove excess nitrate and phosphate from the effluent stream. The research objective of this project is to develop an intensive recirculating system for use in mariculture in which organic matter is reduced and excess nutrients are removed by means of a fluidized bed reactor (FBR).
Laboratory experiments will be carried out to define and optimise the operational conditions for the FBR, including the factors that might promote the (undesirable) production of hydrogen sulphide. The data from these experiments will be used to describe mathematically the principal processes within the anaerobic modules for use in a computer simulation model of the entire system. Because hydrogen sulfide is very toxic to marine fish, it is planned to develop procedures for the indication of its presence in the system and to degrade and remove it if it were accidentally formed. These preliminary experiments will be put together into a pilot-plant fish culture system built in Eilat, Israel involving recirculating water between a fish tank, an aerobic, nitrifying filter, an anaerobic sedimentation/fermentation tank, an FBR and a cartridge containing iron oxide to prevent hydrogen sulfide poisoning. The operation of the pilot-plant will be monitored and physical and chemical data collected over an annual cycle. Using data generated by this project and by earlier literature and other data available on the fish culture and nitrification modules, a mathematical model will be developed. This model, which will represent a quantitative understanding of the operation of the integrated system, "I be calibrated using the data collected during the annual cycle of the pilot-plant and will be used to test our understanding of the operation of the system. Tests will be carried out on the robustness of our understanding of the fish culture system by carrying out short-term changes in the pilot-plant such as altering residence times in certain components to see how the model predictions and the measured data agree. After 18 months operation of ' the initial pilot plant, a second advanced pilot plant will be built in Greece. The plant will be operating in such a way as to compare its performance with a) the first pilot plant and with b) an intensive open mariculture system operated close by in Greece. The recycling and open systems in Greece will operate with similar operating protocols the same physical forcing factors, the same food and fingerlings from the same batch, enabling a comparison of the performance of the new system, both in terms of economic parameters and effluent discharged to be made.
METHODOLOGY AND RESEARCH TASKS
Three stages are proposed:
1. Laboratory studies of the anaerobic components of the biofilter system to examine, the processes of denitrification, organic matter breakdown, phosphate removal and H2S generation/oxidation; and to develop a quantitative understanding of the processes involved.
2. The construction and operation of a pilot fish culture system using aerobic and anaerobic biofilters; development and refinement of the mathematical model.
3. Transfer of the technology into an advanced pilot system based on stage 2. Further refinement to the mathematical model including the development of a user-friendly version to use with the advanced pilot plant. Comparison of performance with an open intensive system.
The gilthead sea bream Sparus aurata will be cultured in the pilot-scale studies.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- engineering and technology environmental engineering waste management waste treatment processes recycling
- agricultural sciences agriculture, forestry, and fisheries fisheries
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences geology sedimentology
- engineering and technology industrial biotechnology bioprocessing technologies fermentation
- natural sciences mathematics applied mathematics mathematical model
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Coordinator
LS2 9JT LEEDS
United Kingdom
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