Narrative: Past and present U.S. and Oriental marine farms have been developed essentially by trial and error procedures. In the hope of improving sea farm performance it is proposed to apply fundamental engineering principles to the development of tuned farms for maximum production. It is intended that this study will help provide a technical base for a new U.S. mariculture industry. System identification via empirically determined transfer functions will help quantify farm performance. The process input is sea surface elevation and the output is water velocity over the farm. Past studies have demonstrated a strong correlation between water velocity over the farm and growth rate of both sea plants and sea animals. Long-line farms will be engineered with three different types of crop substrates attached: hanging lines, panels, and containers. Some of the farm features that influence the hydrodynamic performance include: main line tension, main line length, substrate position along farm, farm sites, main line orientation, buoy size, substrate attachment, and seasites. Many of these features will be studied for both average and storm conditions. An important test of marine farm improvement will be to compare growth of a crop on tuned and untuned farms. The results of the hydrodynamic tests already completed and of those proposed in this effort will be used to design a crop substrate and a storm- resistant farm structure for growth of an agarophyte in the ocean. The results of the crop growth experiments will then be used to further refine the applied marine farm engineering methods.
