Orata - Team Yanmar
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Our team, comprised of four Stanford graduate students and three NTNU graduate students and guided by corporate sponsors from Yanmar, spent the 2018-19 academic year exploring opportunities to use current technologies and modular design to improve productivity within aquaculture businesses. After needfinding and prototyping during the early stages of the project, we focused the scope of our project on oyster farming and then further focused onto the process of sorting oysters. As oysters grow out in bags, they must be periodically brought to land where they are sorted and then replanted with fewer oysters in each bag, giving them space to continue growing. We discovered that for small to medium sized farms, approximately 40% of total farm operation costs are spent on this mid-growth cycle sorting process as it accounts for more than half of their labor hours. We found the current version of this process to be unstructured, labor intensive, and stressful for the oysters - specifically because it requires transportation of every oyster from water to land to be sorted and processed before being taken back to the water. In order to address the needs of the different stakeholders at an oyster farm and to improve the efficiency of this mid-growth sorting process, our team developed a self-sorting oyster bag and a biomass sensing clip. Our vision is for farmers to no longer check the oyster bags manually to determine when they must be sorted and for them to no longer bring the bags to land for the sorting process. Instead, with the sensor clips, the farmers will be alerted that the bags are ready to sort, and the self-sorting bags will require only labor in the water, without the need to remove the bags from the lines. The biomass sensing clips use embedded Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) RFID tags to power a load cell. The tag then relays the sensor readings to a receiving antenna that can be mounted on a boat such that it collects readings from each bag that it passes. The self-sorting bags are a modular system with a removable bottom grate that is changed out for a sorting grate by the farm workers. When left in the water, the bags are tumbled by the waves and tidal movements, allowing the smaller oysters to fall through to a second bag. The next time the farm workers come out to the plot, they can remove the bottom bag and clip it onto the line. The farmer can then wait for the sensor to alert him that the bags are once again ready for density sorting. The Orata bag and sensor clip has the potential for large financial impact on a farm, because of the percentage of operation costs that are spent on mid-growth sorting. If the Orata system is able to reduce the time spent on mid-growth sorting to one third of what it is with traditional practices, it would cause a 25% reduction in annual operation costs for the farms studied during this project. In addition to the financial saving from labor reduction, the Orata system would help farmers manage their inventory, reduce cost of boat operations, and reduce stress on the oysters which can lead to decreased oyster mortality.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | 2019 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Koo, Magdalene | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Olah, Kaitlyn | |
| Author | Reinders, Katie | |
| Author | Hua, Yu | |
| Author | Auflem, Marius | |
| Author | Laverty, Maureen | |
| Author | Vestad, Håvard | |
| Author | Toye, George | |
| Sponsor | Yuji, Sobata | |
| Sponsor | Hiroyuki, Koyama | |
| Sponsor | Hitomi, Kawamoto | |
| Sponsor | Yanmar | |
| Advisor | Cutkosky, Mark | |
| Advisor | Leifer, Larry |
Subjects
| Subject | Product Design |
|---|---|
| Subject | Mechanical Engineering |
| Subject | Design Thinking |
| Subject | Oysters |
| Genre | Student project report |
Bibliographic information
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- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Koo, Magdalene; Olah, Kaitlyn; Reinders, Katie; Hua, Yu; Auflem, Marius; Laverty, Maureen; Vestad, Håvard. (2019). Orata - Team Yanmar. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/jz088xy0649
Collection
ME310 Project Based Engineering Design
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