Solar powered remote water quality management system for aquaculture using biofloc production system Eric B. Blancaflor

Dissertation

College of Industrial Education Doctor of Technology Technological University of the Philippines 2021

The Philippines is considered as one of the world's top producing countries of aquaculture species. Unfortunately, this status was greatly affected due to the influence of climate change and the deteriorating water quality and declining fishing stocks. Thus, fish farmers and aquaculture researchers have been searching for new and innovative technologies that could be used to address climate change issues. One of these technologies is the use of Biofloc systems. This technology uses a zero-water-exchange and it accumulates microorganisms that serve as a food source for the species. In view of the complexity of the process, water quality management is highly recommended. This study aimed to design and develop an Internet of things technology solar powered automated water management system for a biofloc production. The technical and operational effect on shrimp growth and survival of the automated water management in a biofloc production system through the conduct of experimental research were considered in this research. In addition, the economic feasibility of the automated water management system setup in a biofloc production (indoor tank) system was also determined. In this study, the prototype that was developed consists of a mobile application which has the following features, namely; account management, fish/shrimp profile, water quality management, auto feeding and manual controls. The mobile app has the capability to send alert values to the Arduino controller, serving as a reference in activating the corresponding relays for managing the DO, pH and temp level. The iterative and incremental models were used for the software methodology. Finally, the unit, usability and performance test were conducted in this study. Based on the unit test, results showed a 100 % success rate, while the User Acceptance tests results showed an acceptable response for both the functional and non-functional requirements of the system. This indicates that the system is easy to navigate, readable, user-friendly, and useful to target users. Moreover, the performance test results obtained in this study depicted that the CPU and memory usage, loading page response time of the mobile app developed were rated satisfactory. On the other hand, the experimental research conducted in this study shows a favorable response to the biofloc (10% and 3.2% higher survival and growth rate of biofloc vs the RAS) in all stocking densities (100L, 200L. and 300L) conducted. Finally, the cost benefit analysis results in this study showed that the prototype is economically feasible to the fish farmers and target investors-Author's Abstract