Development of a generalist, integrative and predictive model for aquaponics within the European “Smart Aquaponics” project

Aquaponics is the association of fish and plant farming, exploiting the natural phenomenon observed in aquatic ecosystems. The microbiota transforms the fish waste into different chemical forms that are less toxic for fish and very suited for hydroponic plants culture. Due to its recent and quick development, aquaponics can now be found in a variety of areas of interest such as personal installations, education fields, private and public research projects and reached nowadays the food production at medium and large scales industries.
The diversity found in these installations makes it difficult to identify the mechanisms that rule aquaponics and to generalize the findings to other systems. Few researches established the equations that govern the behaviour of one particular system, in order to estimate the productions and to apply sensitivity analysis. These models often satisfy the goals of the developers but cannot be applied to different system setups.
In this context and as part of a research financially supported by the France-Wallonia-Flanders Interreg program, a generalist model is being developed for aquaponics. The equations are based on aquaculture, hydroponics and aquaponics studies and are implemented using an object-oriented programming in order to generate a completely generic model. The European Smart Aquaponics Project provides numerous systems with different architectures. All these installations are equipped with a full set of aquaponics sensors to generate a strong aquaponic database that will be used for model development.
The computed outputs are various and new ones are regularly added to keep pace with the continuous development of aquaponics. In this case study, the model has been applied to an experimental setup to illustrate the basic calculated parameters such as the dynamical behaviours of: the water volumes and several nutrient concentrations, the vegetal and animal biomasses, the water consumption, a few economic criteria, etc.