Abstract
Most Atlantic salmon mariculture operations use open sea cages for the grow out phase. The ultimate fate and effects of the effluents and the possibilities of disease transfer between fish farms are major concerns for farmers, governance and the general public alike. Numerical model systems applied to studying and managing effluents and disease transfer in mariculture must realistically resolve the hydrodynamics in the vicinity of the fish farms. In the present study, the effects of the aquaculture structures on the current patterns were introduced in the ocean model system SINMOD. The drag parameters for the ocean model were determined by comparing the simulation results from the ANSYS Fluent ® software suite and SINMOD in an idealized channel setting with uniform currents. The model was run for a number of realistic scenarios in high horizontal resolution (∼30 m) with sea cages influencing the flow field. Comparisons between extensive current measurements and the simulation results showed that the model system reproduced the current local current field well. By running simulation scenarios with and without the effects of the sea cages on the flow field, it was possible to assess the importance of such effects for numerical dispersal models and aquaculture environment interactions simulations and hence for assessment of environmental impacts.
Highlights
Numerical simulation models are standard and indispensable tools in studies and assessments of environmental effects and interactions of open water aquaculture systems [1, 2]
The numerical value of the drag parameter was estimated by comparing the ocean model results for several values with high resolution Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) results for a similar idealized model setup, and selecting the drag parameter value giving the least difference in the simulation results of the two models
The results from the idealized Fluent1 and simulation results from the ocean model (SINMOD) simulations for u0 = 0.15 ms-1 are shown in Fig 4, with δ = 4 × 10−5 for the SINMOD results
Summary
Numerical simulation models are standard and indispensable tools in studies and assessments of environmental effects and interactions of open water aquaculture systems [1, 2]. Directly or indirectly, integrated in management systems [3,4,5,6]. Common to all such simulation models is that they need to reasonably account for the hydrodynamics at and around the sites involved. While single point current measurements can be appropriate for rough local or near-field assessments, properly resolved hydrodynamics, that must necessarily be supplied by models, are needed for simulation of far-field dispersal in topographically complex and dynamic environments [7, 8].
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