Work packages

Description: One of the main sources of drag of towed demersal fishing gear is from gear components that are in contact with the seabed. Depending on the gear type, these include: groundgear, sweeps, trawl doors, clump weights, beam shoes, and dredge cutting-bars and teeth. There has been much research to improve the performance of trawl doors and to reduce the impact of sweeps, but relatively little to reduce the drag and impact of groundgear and clump weights, thus in this work package we focus on improving the performance of these. We will evaluate the contact- and hydrodynamic drag of these types of components and investigate how they vary with scale. This info will be used both to establish the scale modelling rules of WP2 and to design low-impact bottom-contacting components for the case studies gear of WP4 and WP5. There will be scale modelling trials in the flume tank and full-scale trials at sea on DTU Aqua’s vessel Havfisken of individual components with a specially designed benthic sled.

This work package is led by DTU Aqua.