SMART ELECTRONIC SYSTEM FOR MONITORING WATER QUALITY PARAMETERS IN FISH TANKS

Fish farming represents a strong link in the value chain of food distribution over the world. There are different types of farms like RAS, continuously water alimented pounds, lake, maritime, etc. The self-cleaning water capability of a tank system is the key factor in describing RAS (recirculating aquaculture system) systems. This factor is crucial for the survival of farmed fish in urban aquaculture systems. The aim of this paper consists in describing the design and the functionality of a smart electronic system, capable of monitoring water quality parameters, in order to monitor the fish tanks' environment and making decisions about undesirable events that may affect them. If unpleasant events occur, such as the parameter's level no longer falls within the preseted limits, an alarm is set to warn the user. Automatization of the system will be conceived to close the power and/or water supply circuit in case there was no human intervention within a certain period of time in the fish tanks. This paper is based on the ongoing research of the iPREMAS aquaculture project. The system from the iPREMAS project contains sensors for monitoring the essential water quality parameters for the growth, reproduction and qualitative and quantitative improvement of fish population, such as pH level, water temperature, dissolved oxygen level, water salinity, water level, conductivity and will be improved with sensors to monitor the level of nitrates and nitrites. The sensors are to be connected to a special designed electronic module and will transmit the information to an electronic control module based on a development kit containing a microcontroller for the automatization of the system. A database is used to store the data and a software application is used to visualize the data transmitted by the sensors that will communicate with the database and display the values in real time.