Model of fish farming combined with hydroponic vegetable cultivation

Model of automatic circulation, the water in the aquarium is used to provide waste, nutrition for vegetables, then filtered back to the fish.

A group of students in the 4th year, Faculty of automation, Vietnam National University of Agriculture successfully designed and put the model of automatic hydroponic vegetable cultivation and fish farming automatically introduced at the show "Proud of Vietnamese creativity" part of the International Automation Exhibition 2019. This is a model that applies IoT technology to monitor parameters and control automatically, designed by 4 members of the research team for a year.

The system includes a plant tank, fish tank, water filtration system and automatic monitoring software. The water in the aquarium includes waste, manure containing ammonia, and nitrifying bacteria that are filtered into nitrate, pumped to a plant tank. After absorbing nutrients, plants filter out water and provide back to the fish. When plants have nutrients to grow, fish have clean water to live without watering and filtering.

The model combines fish farming and hydroponic vegetable cultivation.(Photo: NVCC).

Lead researcher Nguyen Van Thanh said that this model was implemented based on the symbiotic mechanism, taking advantage of vegetables and fish so it uses no soil, no fertilizer, no irrigation. The innovative point in the model is the application of IoT technology to monitor parameters and control automatically.

"We have learned and thanks to the help of teachers and engineers to create sensors, placed in fish tanks and vegetable gardens. The sensor helps to update parameters on temperature, oxygen concentration. The device only needs to connect the sensor to the phone, if the parameter exceeds the device, the device will notify the user of the phone.The monitoring of plant and fish development will observe. to be remote " , student Nguyen Van Thanh said.

The group is currently seeking to optimize by using solar batteries to generate power to operate the model."After getting better technically, we are ready to transfer to households and businesses wishing to apply , " Thanh said.