Abstract
The sustainable development of agricultural systems where nutrients and water are recycled to a high degree is of enormous importance. Traditional aquaponics, where fish and plants are cultivated in one recirculating system, addresses these ecological challenges, but still struggles with its economical feasibility. Decoupled multi-loop aquaponics systems, in which the aquaculture and hydroponics subsystems are running autonomously, proved that they can keep up with the productivity of state-of-the-art hydroponics systems or even outscore them. Yet, a problem of such decoupled aquaponics systems was that plants require a high nutrient concentration, whereas fish prefer rather a clean water. In practice, the opposite is happening as the nutrients are added to the aquaculture units through the feed. This paper optimizes a recent approach showing that desalination technologies, such as reverse osmosis, can play an important role in reversing the concentrations within such systems without killing beneficial plant growth–promoting rhizobacteria thermally. The proposed integrated systems approach has the potential to make both periodical nutrient and water discharges and excessive fertilizer supplementation obsolete that would otherwise be necessary to maintain good water quality for the fish and an optimal nutrient solution for the plants.
Highlights
Aquaponics is the process of growing aquatic organisms and plants symbiotically in one system or several subsystems (Lennard and Leonard 2006; Monsees et al 2017b; Yep and Zheng 2019), whereas the process water is recirculated freely between the aquaculture and hydroponics units in one-loop systems (Palm et al 2019); decoupled multi-loop aquaponics systems follow a different approach
The objective of this study is to investigate different desalination processes as well as exploring system solutions to optimize the use of desalination technologies for multi-loop aquaponics systems
Combining different production systems and using their respective waste streams to produce more with fewer resources is the concept of aquaponics
Summary
Aquaponics is the process of growing aquatic organisms and plants symbiotically in one system or several subsystems (Lennard and Leonard 2006; Monsees et al 2017b; Yep and Zheng 2019), whereas the process water is recirculated freely between the aquaculture and hydroponics units in one-loop systems (Palm et al 2019); decoupled multi-loop aquaponics systems follow a different approach. Advantages of decoupled aquaponics systems is a higher water and nutrient use efficiency and presumably higher yields compared with the traditional approach and stand-alone hydroponics systems (Delaide et al 2016; Dijkgraaf et al 2019; Goddek and Vermeulen 2018; Nicoletto et al 2018; Nozzi et al 2018; Saha et al 2016). This tendentious effect was mainly being observed when growing leafy vegetables and does not apply for all crops. Recent publications showed that a nutrient solution based on aquaculture water increased the uptake of salts and might make such discharges obsolete (Delaide et al 2017; Goddek and Vermeulen 2018)
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