Numerical Investigation on the Cage-to-Cage Wake Effect: A Case Study of a 4 × 2 Cage Array

Aquaculture has been the world’s fastest-growing food producing method and grown to become the second-largest export industry in Norway during the past 40 years. Usually, the high-value fish such as Atlantic Salmon (Salmo Salar) is raised in a multi-cage fish farm, where the flow interactions between fish cages exist. In this study, the interactions between fish cages are implemented into the numerical program, FhSim, to investigate its influences on the responses of a multi-cage fish farm. Tensions in anchor lines, drag force, and cultivation volume of each cage in a full-scale 4 × 2 multi-cage fish farms under different flow directions are analyzed numerically. The discrepancies of the responses based on three cases, i.e., (i) without any wake effects, (ii) with only cage-to-cage wake effect, and (iii) with all the wake effects, are compared and discussed. The results indicate that neglecting the wake effects will overestimate the total drag force of the eight cages up to 128% and underestimate the total cultivation volume of the eight cages as much as 42%. This study can provide suggestions on how to consider the wake effects during the design of the multiple-cage system.

Dissolved Oxygen Profiles and Its Problems at Lake Maninjau, West Sumatra – Indonesia

In general, the tropical lake in Indonesia is one of the unique ecosystems which are functioning in both ecological and economic services. This study aims to analyze the dissolved oxygen profile of caldera tropical lake represented by Lake Maninjau at West Sumatera, Indonesia, and its impacts. Lake Maninjau is not only for culture fisheries but also serves as important hydroelectricity power. Surveys at Lake Maninjau were conducted in August 2006, March 2014, September 2017, and April 2018. The results showed that the average depth is 105 m. It covers 13,260 ha of an area with an elevation of 461.5 m above sea level and a maximum depth of 165 m. The lake water comes from rainfall, small rivers, and the surrounding groundwater, with one outflow in the Batang Antokan River. Based on the measurement, it was observed that decreasing dissolved oxygen levels occurred at the surface to the depth of 40 m in 2006, and changed from surface to a depth of 12 m in 2018 indicating the worse condition of water quality compared with the previous years. Recently, bad water quality with mass mortality of cultured fish often occurs. Next, the percentage of fish cages area at Lake Maninjau in 2017 was 0.43%. Besides human activities, it was suggested that fish cages also contributed pollutant load to this lake. To maintain the sustainability of the lake, basic ecological information is necessary for the next study.

Flow Turbulence Characteristics and Mass Transport in the Near-Wake Region of an Aquaculture Cage Net Panel

Cage-based aquaculture has been growing rapidly in recent years. In some locations, cage-based aquaculture has resulted in the clustering of large quantities of cages in fish farms located in inland lakes or reservoirs and coastal embayments or fjords, significantly affecting flow and mass transport in the surrounding waters. Existing studies have focused primarily on the macro-scale flow blockage effects of fish cages, and the complex wake flow and associated near-field mass transport in the presence of the cages remain largely unclear. As a first step toward resolving this knowledge gap, this study employed the combined Particle Image Velocimetry and Planar Laser Induced Fluorescence (PIV-PLIF) flow imaging technique to measure turbulence characteristics and associated mass transport in the near wake of a steady current through an aquaculture cage net panel in parametric flume experiments. In the near-wake region, defined as ~3M (mesh size) downstream of the net, the flow turbulence was observed to be highly inhomogeneous and anisotropic in nature. Further downstream, the turbulent intensity followed a power-law decay after the turbulence production region, albeit with a decay exponent much smaller than reported values for analogous grid-generated turbulence. Overall, the presence of the net panel slightly enhanced the lateral spreading of the scalar plume, but the lateral distribution of the scalar concentration, concentration fluctuation and transverse turbulent scalar flux exhibited self-similarity from the near-wake region where the flow was still strongly inhomogeneous. The apparent turbulent diffusivity estimated from the gross plume parameters was found to be in reasonable agreement with the Taylor diffusivity calculated as the product of the transverse velocity fluctuation and integral length scale, even when the plume development was still transitioning from a turbulent-convective to turbulent-diffusive regime. The findings of this study provide references to the near-field scalar transport of fish cages, which has important implications in the assessment of the environmental impacts and environmental carrying capacity of cage-based aquaculture.

AUTOMATED FISH CAGES INVENTORYNG AND MONITORING USING H/A/α UNSUPERVISED WISHART CLASSIFICATION IN SENTINEL 1 DUAL POLARIZATION DATA

Aquaculture fish cages are usually located remote areas with poor accessibility. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is relevant to register and monitor their activity. However, in order to take advantage of the large amount of information this technology produce, it is necessary to develop automated tools of analysis. This work proposes an automated approach through an unsupervised polarimetric classification method using Sentinel 1 IW SLC Dual-Pol (VV + VH) products. An experimental evaluation was applied in Calbuco, an area with intense aquaculture activity in southern Chile. It was possible to demonstrate that this approach allows to improve the capacity of classification of previous experiences (86.49% user’s accuracy and 96.97% producer´s accuracy). Further studies are required to know the impact of wind speed on the classification as well as the spatial precision of the detection.