Honeycomb Fiber-Reinforced Polymer Sandwich Panels for Fish Culture Tanks

The U.S. aquaculture gross revenues have grown from $350 million in 1985 to nearly $900 million in 1996, and while large overseas markets are available for native products, the national aquaculture production was only about 3 percent of world production value. It is argued that the utilization of impaired mine waters abundant in West Virginia (WV) and the other mid-Appalachian states for fish culture can substantially increase aquaculture economic development. Approximately 878.12 million L of water per day are discharged in WV from both active and abandoned mines, and if only 30% of these water resources were used for aquaculture, the expansion of this industry in WV would be significant. The primary limitation to the effective utilization of discharged waters is the lack of suitable fish culture tanks that can be easily installed in rugged terrains surrounding mine water treatment plants. Such topographical constraints do not easily permit the construction of cast-in-place concrete tanks, and therefore, FRP sandwich materials offer an economical alternative for production of modular, transportable, light, and durable fish culture raceway systems. This study is concerned with the development and evaluation of prototype fish culture tanks using a honeycomb FRP (HFRP) sandwich panel with sinusoidal core geometry, which is produced by KSCI by the contact-molding process. Based on defined functional requirements, a raceway system consisting of four staggered tanks is designed, and each tank is 1.83×9.14-0.91m, with a middle partition along the 9.14m length to carry out parallel aquaculture studies. Representative panel samples of the side and bottom walls as well as the side-to-bottom panel connections are tested within the linear range and eventually to failure. The linear response of the samples is analyzed by the finite element method.