Aquaponics – A Process Control Approach

An aquaponics automation design was undertaken to interpret the system requirements to integrate automation to operate and optimize the system. The system was designed to increase the layers of control over the inputs and outputs to operate the system with a process control approach. The viability of these levels of control over the process was investigated by undertaking a processes design to assess types of instrumentation required and control functions that could be incorporated into the design to optimize the process. The design process incorporated sub-systems that did not rely on a main system, to increase ranges of commercially viable crops. The subsystems do not have the same environmental requirements of the main system and the subsystems environment could be calibrated to meet specific requirements of a selected crop including fruiting vegetable types. The results of the automation design have been tabulated into this article to assess the viability of increased levels of process control to obtain subsystem designs with maximized optimization.