Design Ras For Oddly Shaped Tank

[andrew hickman]

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. I realize with some stuff we might be SOL (like a protein skimmer) and will have to find room elsewhere, but we hope to put as much stuff as possible under 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 is a super rough drawing of the elevations were working with.

 

[stella1979]

Hmmm, had to look this one up. I'm assuming by RAS you mean a recirculating aquaculture system? Building one sounds very interesting and the dimensions aren't all that strange considering the huge but shallow frag tanks that aquaculturists use. I'm afraid I wouldn't know where to even begin, but there's bound to be someone here that knows more about the design of these things.

I'd love to watch this thing come together! Let me call on a few friends of mine.

@Culprit @Nanologist @Nart @Wild Bill @KinsKicks

Welcome to Fishlore!!! Great first post.

 

[KinsKicks]

That is really aweosme! Building a filtration system won’t be super difficult, but it’ll require some creativity. Some quick questions, if you don’t mind

1. Is the main tank going to be “sectioned off” If so, it’ll require a different design to equally filter all the sections. If not, and it just going to be one big tank, then that makes thing a little bit easier

2. How much clearance for equipment do you have above and around the tank (so not underneath)

3. And the most important... how aesthetically pleasing is this needing to be?


(Tia!)

 

[andrew hickman]

I'd love to watch this thing come together! Let me call on a few friends of mine.

@Culprit @Nanologist @Nart @Wild Bill @KinsKicks

Welcome to Fishlore!!! Great first post.

Thank you so much for the help!

That is really aweosme! Building a filtration system won’t be super difficult, but it’ll require some creativity. Some quick questions, if you don’t mind

1. Is the main tank going to be “sectioned off” If so, it’ll require a different design to equally filter all the sections. If not, and it just going to be one big tank, then that makes thing a little bit easier

2. How much clearance for equipment do you have above and around the tank (so not underneath)

3. And the most important... how aesthetically pleasing is this needing to be?


(Tia!)

1. One big tank, 40 feet long, 4 feet wide, 0.66 feet tall.
2. Above? That's interesting, can we put stuff above it? To be honest I'm not completely sure because I didn't even think to note that, but at least a couple feet. This is all going to be done in our professors greenhouse an hour away, but I can try to make a trip out to make some measurements. We have maybe a 4 feet end of the tank to work with, not really any space to the side of the tank. Worst case, we can cut the bench to make the tank shorter in order to add more components at the end, but would rather avoid that. If we were putting something under the tank that was 5 feet wide (maybe even 6), then we could get that to work, but we would rather avoid that as well.
3. We welcome the ugly. This tank is built for efficiency, purely for maximizing shrimp growth.

[Here](https://i.imgur.com/2enhErv.png) is a simple drawing of the shape of our tank (completely subject to change). The design of the tank itself I'm not concerned about since we are getting the design from a local professor, but everything were not getting too much help with.

 

[CobraTaco]

Hey guys I'm on the team with Andrew. Here's basically where we are at. Ends of the tank may be rounded to promote counter-clockwise current flow but there's still a LOT that's up in the air. Such as the construction of the filters, sump system, venturi pump array, ect.
Here's some pics to get an idea of what we are trying to build.
https://i.imgur.com/2enhErv.png
https://i.imgur.com/O0plgkZ.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/Er3bNdU.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/OUROiuR.jpg

 

[andrew hickman]

Just an update, but an important thing to note is we only need 10-25% GPH, so at max we will have 200 GPH. The tank itself will have around 3kg per meter squared at final harvest, so that's what the biofilter is designed for. Would i be able to use Steps in Calculating Amount of K1 in MB for designing the biofilter?

edit: Also, I found this post (https://www.advancedaquarist.com/2004/3/aquarium) which seems like something we could utilize for our designing. Trying to wrap my brain around the post as a whole.

 

[CobraTaco]

Tank design update! https://i.imgur.com/PqSfiiP.png 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. Might still need to add a protein skimmer need more info.
https://i.imgur.com/PqSfiiP.png

 

[andrew hickman]

One issue were having is some people have incredibly simple/cheap builds (like a pond biofilter/uv/normal filter combo with a pump going to a biofilter) and others have an incredibly complex design (multiple sock filters/protein skimmer/several pumps/etc) and its hard to know which direction we should go with.

Here are examples of two videos, same amount of water but completely different designs with respect to complexity:

I would much rather design something similar to the first video. Not because we're lazy, but because were inexperienced in the subject. I've had a lot of experience with designing things that are completely over my head and ended up costing myself way more money/time in repairing my own mistakes due to my inexperience.

Opinions?

 

[andrew hickman]

Just an update, were planning on using a couple 100 micron filtering socks combined with a emerged biofiltration system. Since this is technically a prototype build, our biology expert suggests we keep things as simple as possible, so that is the reason were not including a lot of the more expensive components (like a protein skimmer). At this time, were trying to actually design the size of the sump/how much biomedia is required (which is proving difficult to nail down).