Environment | populations around dams Sustaining aqua
MSD Animal Health has launched a line of Hyper InfusiO2n™ solutions, designed to optimize the environment around dam facilities and improve attraction to fish ladder entrances. Here, Kasha Cox, global aqua commercial lead, talks to IWP&DC about the new solution and explains how it can help sustain healthy fish populations while maintaining hydropower
Can you provide a description of the Hyper InfusiO2n™ Solutions? Merck Animal Health is excited to offer a series of modular, scalable fish passage solutions to promote the long-term sustainability of both renewable hydropower as well as the surrounding aquatic species. These holistic, customizable solutions were developed to provide actionable intelligence to resource managers by monitoring the movement and population structures of wild fishes, optimizing attraction and survival through fish passage facilities, and benchmarking solution performance from both an operational and uplift perspective. The newest tool in our portfolio of solutions, Hyper
InfusiO2n™, optimizes the environment for aquatic organisms by infusing dissolved oxygen that is immediately available for respiration. At the most basic level, infusion adds dissolved oxygen to water by leveraging a one-to-one exchange of oxygen for other dissolved gasses. Alternatively, diffusion (the only other commercially available oxygenation technology) adds gaseous oxygen to water which must dissolve before it becomes bioavailable, and often rapidly off gasses before dissolution, especially in turbulent environments such as fish passage facilities. The unique ability to deliver stable, bioavailable oxygen throughout the duration of a turbulent fish ladder opens a world of opportunities for more efficient and improved attraction, passage, and survival of fish moving beyond hydropower facilities. In addition to our new Hyper InfusiO2n solutions to
optimize the environment, our fish passage solutions leverage 30+ years of fish ID and monitoring experience with our Biomark RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, readers, and an extensive infrastructure of in-stream and passage antennas. These monitoring insights are set up for remote access and download to benchmark solution performance, return on investment, and environmental benefit. By seamlessly linking monitoring, optimization, and benchmarking data in digital portal (BioLogic), we provide customers real time, end to end data for enhanced resource management. Oxygen diffusion approaches have made considerable and impressive advancements, one example is ionized nanobubble technology – described as neutrally buoyant oxygen bubbles that maintain an ionic charge that reduces the probability of coalescence, enabling oxygen bubbles to remain in water for extended periods of time in hopes that eventually oxygen will become dissolved. Oxygen infusion is distinguished by the fact that oxygen enters water is a dissolved state that is immediately available for fish respiration. Hyper InfusiO2n solutions
30 | July 2022 |
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are distinguished by the fact that the introduction of dissolved oxygen is offset by the extraction of other dissolved gasses, resulting in little or no change in total gas pressure.
Our Hyper InfusiO2n solution achieves this by creating
a strong concentration gradient between oxygen in a gaseous phase and nitrogen and other trace gasses in an aqueous dissolved state. Similar to fish respiration and dynamic equilibrium between atmospheric and dissolved gasses in any body of water, the differential in concentrations forces gas exchange until an equilibrium is achieved. The benefit of this technology is that oxygen cannot pass into solution without the simultaneous transit of nitrogen or other trace gasses. While this technology has corollaries with industrial
approaches, it was developed specifically to support aquatic life, requiring grassroots development of gas- exchange media and hardened materials capable of withstanding extended submersion in freshwater and saltwater environments.
What kind of testing has been carried out? Operational evaluations, such as our ability to achieve dissolved oxygen concentrations of 442% without significantly altering total gas pressure, have been completed across our portfolio of solutions. Additionally, lab-based evaluations demonstrate that fish are significantly attracted to and choose areas of elevated dissolved oxygen. Given the infused oxygen is far more stable than diffused, this attraction response in fish makes our Hyper InfusiO2n solution ideal for passage. Using oxygen, rather than attraction flow, optimizes not only fish passage, but also the return on mitigation investment for hydropower operators. Long-term studies of key aquatic organisms are
currently underway to assess outcomes accompanying extended exposure to elevated oxygen concentrations under normo-baric conditions.
Has the solution been tested at a dam project? We installed an enhanced oxygen solution at a dam approximately four years ago to improve fish attraction and passage. Independent third-party evaluation documented a 1200% increase in total fish passage and a ten-fold reduction in mortality for a key species. To date the Hyper InfusiO2n solution has exceeded design specifications by four-fold and has operated with zero maintenance because of COVID, which precluded scheduled maintenance. While we have demonstrated improved fish attraction, passage, and survival we have also
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