Development and Testing of an Aquaculture Pen Sensing System

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Aquaculture is the farming of fish, shellfish, marine plants, and other marine animals through controlled conditions in freshwater and saltwater environments. In the general case, fish stocks are reared in large pens consisting of numerous cages each approximately on the order of 100 m in diameter. These cages use netting systems hung from a large ring structure to contain the fish. On the east coast of Canada, aquaculture operations for fish production face particular challenges due to the severity of the ocean conditions. Currently, in strong storm events the cages experience significant deformations and loads. In some cases, the mooring lines anchoring the pen and the connection lines attached individual cages have broken. The proposed work aims to develop and test a sensing system which can determine the loads in the mooring and connection lines. Accurate, time-indexed data on the line loads is critical for economical redesign of the pen structure with the goal of more resilient infrastructure.