Analysis of sediment transport modeling using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for aquaculture raceways

A simulation model to analyze the water flow and sediment transport in aquaculture raceways was developed using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software package. The simulation was used to evaluate the efficiency of solids settling in the quiescent zone of existing trout raceways. This efficiency was based on the percentage of solids removed, which corresponds to the percentage of solids introduced into the raceway that settle in it, with settling taking place primarily in the quiescent zone.

The raceway selected for model validation was a rectangular concrete raceway 30.0 m long, 3.0 m wide, 0.9 m deep, with a slope of 0.01. The raceway included a quiescent zone of approximately 5.3 m in length, which was separated from the rearing area by a screen. The water flow rate through the raceway was approximately 0.058 m³/s. Velocity measurements were recorded at 230 stations along the raceway using an acoustic Doppler velocimeter, for comparison with the results obtained from the simulations.

For the purpose of simulating sediment transport, six groups of particles were used to account for the total suspended solids. The sizes of the particles selected were based on an experimentally determined distribution for solids from a similar raceway, and were 692, 532, 350, 204, 61, and 35 μm for Groups 1–6, respectively. The particle density for each size was assumed to be 1150 kg/m³. Values of the percentage of solids removed for the different particle sizes were 100.0% for the largest particles, and 54.7, 0.9, and 0.1% for the three smallest particles, respectively. This methodology of analyzing the raceway sediment transport in terms of its percentage of solids removed based on CFD simulations can also be used to examine raceway design alternatives for improving the particle removal efficiency.