11.6 Multi-loop Aquaponic Modelling

Traditional aquaponic designs comprise of aquaculture and hydroponic units involving recirculating water between both subsystems (Körner et al. 2017; Graber and Junge 2009). In such one-loop aquaponic systems, it is necessary to make trade-offs between the conditions of both subsystems in terms of pH, temperature and nutrient concentrations, as fish and plants share one ecosystem (Goddek et al. 2015). By contrast, decoupled double-loop aquaponic systems separate the RAS and hydroponic units from one another, creating detached ecosystems with inherent advantages for both plants and fish. Recently, there has been an increased interest in closing the loop in terms of nutrients as well as increasing the input-output efficiency. For that reason, remineralization (Goddek 2017; Emerenciano et al. 2017; Goddek et al. 2018; Yogev et al. 2016) and desalination loops (Goddek and Keesman 2018) have been incorporated into the overall system design. Such systems are called decoupled multi-loop aquaponic system (Goddek et al. 2016).

Sizing the respective subsystems is fundamental of having a functioning checkand-balance system. For sizing one-loop systems, a simple rule of thumb is generally used, determining the hydroponic cultivation area based on the daily feed input to the RAS (Knaus and Palm 2017; Licamele 2009). The higher degree of complexity of multi-loop systems does not allow this approach anymore, as it comes with inherent risks for making false assumptions for each subsystem. There is a growing body of literature that examines mass balances for aquaponic systems (Körner et al. 2017; Goddek et al. 2016; Reyes Lastiri et al. 2016; Karimanzira et al. 2016). While some research has been carried out in developing numerical models for one- and multiloop aquaponic systems, no single study exists that integrates a multi-loop aquaponic model with a complemented full-scale deterministic greenhouse model. This is particularly relevant for sizing the system, since plant growth and nutrient uptake are location dependent with crop transpiration as major driver. In concrete terms, this means that the climate within a greenhouse — which is highly dependent on the external weather conditions — has a high impact on plant growth given environmental factors such as relative humidity (RH), light irradiation, temperature, carbon dioxide (COsub2/sub) levels, etc. that were incorporated in greenhouse microclimate modelling (Körner et al. 2007; Janka et al. 2018).