Open ocean aquaculture engineering

Abstract

The University of New Hampshire, Center for Ocean Engineering (UNH/COE) Open Ocean Aquaculture (OOA) engineering efforts continue to be focused on developing engineering design and analysis tools for assessing, evaluating and optimizing engineering systems required for successful open ocean aquaculture. During 2002, this effort was focused on four tasks to continue the understanding of OOA: (1) investigation of commercial size cages, (2) expansion of the mooring system at the experimental location, (3) feed buoy development, and (4) net panel drag studies to enhance the understanding of this issue. Commercial size cage investigations included numerical and physical modeling of the SADCO-Shelf fish cage, and an initial study of a Sea Station 3000 cage with a tension leg mooring. Analysis of the expansion of the existing mooring was begun to study the effects of having many cages and larger cages at the site. Feed buoy development moved forward with the deployment of a separate independently moored system. The drag studies on net panels provided insight to the increased drag due to biofouling of experimental panels deployed at the offshore site. This paper presents selected results from these four tasks.