Was recommended I put this post here, as you guys might be more knowledgeable on the subject.
Part of my senior design project involves designing and building a RAS for a tank that is 40 feet long, 4 feet wide, and 0.6 feet tall (averaging 800 gallons of saltwater). I understand the basics concepts of how all this works, but there's so many options and the fact that the tank has such a weird shape makes this much more difficult. On top of that, we only have around 2 and a half feet of height below the tank to add any extra components. Our sponsor wants us to be able to put all of the components underneath the tank.
Will be growing a lot of shrimp, so we need to filter the water as much as possible. We also want to automate this/simplify everything as much as possible so that labor to maintain it is at a minimum.
Were assuming we would need a settling tank, though were a little confused on designing that. Next we would need some sort of added filter to take out anything that the protein skimmer would not be able to handle. Past that, the biofilter. I assume that going with a fluidized moving bed filter would be the best option since its efficient, but opinions are welcome!
We have close to $8k to spend on this, so efficiency is definitely more important than cost for this application. Any opinions and ideas setups to research are greatly appreciated! I realize I sound mostly clueless, but this project kind of turned into this and we've gotta do a lot of research in little time.
Here area some random pictures of what we might be working with:
Tank Design: Ends of the tank may be rounded to promote counter-clockwise current flow.
Picture 2: Tiny black things are going to be venturi pumps (for ccw flow) long grey pipes will be Air Diffusers to create a "bubble wall" in middle of tank (for ccw flow). Drums under the tank will be a Canister filter and a Biofilter. All of the components under the tank are really just us spit-balling. There's still a LOT that's up in the air. Such as the construction of the filters, sump system, venturi pump array, ect.
A thing to note: Were getting the tank design from a professor at the university, he's tested it for years and it's proven to work extremely efficiently. Really, our system is designed around his tank.
I’d love to take showers for an unlimited amount of time. Plus not having to refill the tank all the time would be huge.
But I’ve heard some cons. What are your opinions?
I like coco but I dislike how much runoff gets wasted , so I’m curious why they suggest you don’t recirculate and if I did wanna recirculate in a similar medium what should I use ?
Has anyone experimented with 24/7 recirculating drip system in coco ??? I left my system running for 24hrs by mistake once after an aggressive trim and it bounced back extremely quick . Any thoughts ???
