Design and development of Recirculating Aquaculture System (RAS) for sustainable production and water quality research

Abstract Fisheries are the primary source of livelihood for several communities. Fishing in India is a primary industry, employing 14.5 million people and contributing to 1.07% of the total GDP of India (2020, “Fishing in India - Wikipedia). Currently, most aquaculture systems are biofloc systems or pond farming setups. While wild fishing is slowly becoming unsustainable, aquaculture faces the problem of people using incorrect filtration methods, which leads to a high mortality rate. A 3-stage filtration system for freshwater aquaculture or recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) was built to tackle this problem. The RAS prototype was designed to satisfy compactness, efficiency, longevity, and financial requirements. The culture tank (main fish tank) has a capacity of 1000 L and is stocked with 100 fish. The stocking density comes out to be almost double as compared to bio floc systems. The three stages of filtration are mechanical filtration, biological filtration, and ultraviolet (UV) filtration. The fish used to test this prototype are mono-sex tilapia(200g) (GIFT)(2019, “An Excellent Candidate Species for World Aquaculture: A Review).