ABSTRACT
Aquaculture, or fish farming, now provides hundreds of thousands of tons of edible fish to the United States. Ninety percent of United States production consists of catfish, crawfish, salmon, shrimp, trout, tilapia, clams, and other shellfish accounting for 790 MM pounds. Commercial aquaculture operations generate a serious water pollution problem. To avoid consumer rejection and market share losses, producers and processors screen channel catfish for off-flavors and do harvest and process those off-flavor fish. A fixed bed granular activated carbon adsorber protocol for off-flavor removal has been modeled for water. The adsorption equilibrium for geosmin and MIB was determined from bench-scale adsorbers and dimensional analysis provided performance parameters for a large-scale process. Filtering and carbon-treating the tens of thousands of acres of pond water to remove flavor is impractical and uneconomical. Small scale depuration of the fish just prior to harvesting is the most economical approach.
