New Engineering Approach for the Development and Demonstration of a Multi-Purpose Platform for the Blue Growth Economy

Abstract

Aquaculture is currently the fastest growing food sector in the world and the open oceans are seen as one of the most likely areas for large-scale expansion [1], [2], [3]. The global demand for seafood is continuing to rise sharply, driven by both population growth and increased per capita consumption, whilst wild-capture fisheries are constrained in their potential to produce more seafood. A recently funded EC project, the Blue Growth Farm – BGF (GA n. 774426, 1st June 2018 – 30th September 2021) aims at contributing to this world need with an original solution. The Blue Growth Farm proposes an efficient, cost-competitive and environmentally friendly multi-purpose offshore farm concept. It is based on a modular floating structure, moored to the seabed, meeting requirements of efficiency, cost-competitiveness and environmental friendless, where automated aquaculture and renewable energy production systems are integrated and engineered for profitable applications in the open sea. In the present paper, the overall engineering approach developed to carry out the research work is presented, described and justified. Different technical and scientific challenges are addressed through an integrated industrial engineering design approach, where all disciplines are tuned to achieve the Blue Growth Farm main targets. These are represented by: i) guaranteeing expected nominal fish production thanks to advanced automation and remote control capabilities; ii) minimizing the pollution introduced at marine ecosystem level when exploiting the marine natural resources, whilst increasing the social acceptance and users community agreement; iii) maximizing the electricity production in the Blue Growth Farm potential installation area ecosystem to provide energy supply to the on-board electrical equipment and to dispatch the extra produced electric energy to the land network. Preliminary engineering design results are promising to demonstrate effective increase of safety and efficiency by reducing on-board human effort and consequently risks at offshore, thus to make commercial-scale open ocean farming a reality. The present paper introduces overall concepts and design methodology whilst other companion works submitted at OMAE2019 [4], [5], [6] provide insight of specific aspects of the Blue Growth Farm project elaborated during the first six months activity.

Analysis of the Coupled Dynamics of an Offshore Floating Multi-Purpose Platform: Part A — Rigid Body Analysis

“…A rigid-body approach is adopted in this paper, while the complementary hydro-elastic analysis is reported in a companion paper [17]. Please refer to [18,19] for the detailed design methodology of the multi-purpose platform The structure of this research is outlined as follows. First, the requirements produced by multiple purposes will be briefly introduced before the final main characteristics are given.…”

Integrating Wind Turbines and Fish Farms: An Evaluation of Potential Risks to Marine and Coastal Bird Species

“…Fish farms traditionally rely on diesel generators for electrical power, but there is an increasing interest in using different kinds of renewable energy (RE) systems, including wind turbines, solar photovoltaic (PV) modules, and/or wave-powered generators, to reduce the sector's reliance on fossil fuels [2,3]. Co-locating RE technology and aquaculture in close proximity, including integrating them into a single 'Multi-Purpose Platform' (MPP) structure, is thus intuitively appealing [4,5]. The development of MPPs is at a very early stage; however, if implemented widely, they could also generate novel environmental impacts that need to be considered carefully.…”

Deep aspirations: towards a sustainable offshore Blue Economy

“…Many coastal states have recognised the potential of offshore waters to deliver economic growth, and this has led to increased research and development activity addressing the logistical and technical challenges of working in this area. For example, development of multi-use offshore platforms to integrate offshore activities is a particular focus of current research and testing (Zanuttigh et al 2016;Dalton et al 2019;Lagasco et al 2019) and individual sectors, such as aquaculture, are actively developing offshore options.…”