In fisheries, the importance of designing efficient fish cages is being emphasized as aquaculture has become more production than capture fishing. Particularly, the gravity cage system is one of the popular fish cage system in Korea. Currently, gravity cages of various shapes and sizes are being widely designed and installed in offshore and inland seas. The cage is subject to external forces, such as currents and waves, and the shape of the structure and tension on the ropes changes according to these external forces. Thus, it is important to accurately calculate these dynamic behavior, including the external forces and tension on the structure during the design stage. In this study, three types of cage systems with an equal internal volume of 8000 m3 were analyzed using mass-spring models and their behavior was interpreted through simulations. These simulations were used to analyze the behavior and tension of the ropes in response to currents and waves to aid in the selection of individual cage sizes for a given total volume. The numerical calculation results indicate that depending on the flow rate, the most resistant system is System 1, which has eight strays, and System 2 and System 3 have 69.4% and 54.8% of the resistance of System 1. Further, total resistance increased as the number of cages increased for all flow rates.
In the previous study, a shooting trajectory assuming that the purse seine shooting trajectory is a circle was proposed based on the speed and direction of the movement of the fish school. However, in practice, a trajectory that is closer to an elliptical shape than a circular one is often formed. In this study, the existing circular trajectory and the elliptical trajectory methods were compared under the same conditions to confirm the effectiveness of elliptical shooting trajectory. In addition, changes in the eccentricity of ellipses were derived to assess which type of ellipse was appropriate as a shooting trajectory. When a high-speed fish school moves in a straight line, an elliptical shooting trajectory with the eccentricity of 0.7 to 0.9 will be reasonable, and for middle-low speed fish school, an elliptical shooting trajectory with the eccentricity of 0.4 to 0.6 will be more useful than a circle shooting trajectory.