To safely develop offshore aquaculture in the federal waters of the US, a public need exists for engineering best practices to ensure system reliability while quantifying accurate capital costs and design life expectations. A new set of best practices are required since existing approaches were developed for higher risk industries such as offshore oil/gas/wind, or inshore salmon farms with limited exposure. The procedure builds upon a critical body of peer-reviewed work for unbiased and transparent approaches for the design of macroalgae, shellfish, net-pen and integrated multitrophic aquaculture systems. In this presentation, an overview of techniques will be provided to:
(1) Establish appropriate metocean conditions for aquaculture system design,
(2) Apply high-fidelity numerical models to represent offshore structure dynamics,
(3) Calculate critical structural loads and motions,
(4) Establish safety factors based on the probability of survival and
(5) Specify components considering material design life.
The results of this work will be formulated into a comprehensible NOAA Technical Memorandum supported by a series of journal publications to provide technical details. The standardized offshore engineering products will help facilitate a streamlined permitting process with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with respect to Section 10 of the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899. This will enable further growth of a resilient marine aquaculture industry in the US, especially as operations extend to potential Aquaculture Opportunity Area sites.