DEVELOPMENT OF SOLAR POWERED AERATORS IN SHRIMP FARMS

Fishing is one of the ancient and widespread activities in the coastal area of Tamil Nadu. Fishes are made available to the people either through capture from wild, natural waters and farm production. Equipments and machineries are now-a-days used in shrimp farms to increase the production and profit. The aerators and other electrical equipments used in shrimp farms are energized either by the power from the grid or by using depleting energy resources like petrol or diesel. The electrical power requirement in shrimp farms is found to increase with farm size. The Farm profitability not only depends on shrimp yield but also low spending electricity.

The present study was aimed to envisages saving in the cost of production of shrimps by using solar energy to operate aerators and other equipment in Shrimp farms The annual solar radiation in Nagapattinam District is. For the production of 4.5t of shrimps in 1 Hectare farm, 5 aerators of 2Hp motors are used. Totally 7.5KW/Hr of electrical energy is spent in and around of Nagapattinam District. The shrimp farmers spent around Rs.40,000/- as bi-monthly for electrical charges. The optimal sizing of 8KW photovoltaic panel, 14 batteries of 150Ah and 10 kVA inverter is used to reduce 45% of the electricity charges.

Fig. 1 indicates the statics data of various shrimp farms and Electricity consumption charges of various farms in Nagapattinam District. The power consumption is higher in mechanized farms. This study proves that the electricity consumption could be reduced by replacing the mechanized farms with Solar energy. The study is in implementing stage at College of Fisheries Engineering, Nagapattinam.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This work is a part of the research project (Sanction No.F.No.4-77/2015-ASR-I funded by ICAR,New Delhi,India to the Corresponding Author (D.B)