Energy optimization of bottom trawls

Bottom trawling is used for many of the most important fisheries in Norway. High energy costs have reduced the profitability to a critical level. Preliminary calculations have shown that optimization of the gear with respect to energy efficiency may lead to significant savings for the industry.

Investigations have shown that most fishing vessels may reduce the towing resistance up to 20% by tuning of the gear. For the Norwegian fleet this will reduce the annual energy costs by approximately 100 mill. NOK if the oil price remains at the current level.

Bottom trawl fishery is highly based on experience. The fishermen have little or no access to tools for computation of how the gear's performances with respect to energy and fishing efficiency are altered by certain adjustments.

In a new project SINTEF Fisheries and Aquaculture will perform systematic experiments with the various trawl components to examine how they influence on the towing resistance and global geometry of the gear.  These experiments will be made in cooperation with many of the manufacturers of trawl gear. The results will be the basis for tuning of mathematical models describing the system. These models will be made available for the fisher-men in a computer tool, supporting the fishery operations at sea.

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