Verification Experiments of Aerators in Aquacultural Ponds

An aerator, which can induce circulation, supply dissolved oxygen and improve bottom mud conditions, is one of the important equipment for aquaculture. Many of the aquacultural farmers have installed and utilized the aerator to keep better aquacultural ponds conditions and products growth. However, most of the farmers operate the aerator empirically due to lack of the criteria for usage, setting and operating of the aerator. Such empirical operation might immiserate the farmers because the management expense of the aerator must be costly. In addition, the empirical operation might impact the nature environments. Therefore, systematic operation of the aerator might be required from both economic and environment points of view. In order to perceive the usage tendency and clarify the performance of the aerator we conducted survey on the usage of the aerator at Samut Songkram Province, Thailand. After the survey we conducted operation experiments of the aerator at Samut Songkram Fisheries Research Station, Faculty of Fisheries, Kasetsart University to verify the impacts of the aerator on water temperature and dissolved oxygen (DO) level in the ponds. From the survey results, it was clarified that most of the farmers didn't know operation way of the aerator and run the aerator continuously. However the operation experiments of the aerator indicated that the performance of the aerator was not necessarily lead the better impact for the water quality. In this paper we discuss and propose the better operation method of the aerator based on both survey and experiments results.