The Automatic Floating-island-type Purification Device

The Automatic Floating-island-type Purification Device

(云上花园图)

Is it a scenic garden?

Is it a vegetable garden or grain field?

Is it a purification device?

Is it an environmental protection system?

Is it eco-agriculture?

Is it demonstration of ancient Chinese culture?

 

It is all that in one ___ a multi-functional water purification system, developed by Anqing Spring Aquatic Vegetable Institute which is headed by the institute director Prof Xu Shan-xin, who is also a writer and a poet, and a visiting professor of Changjiang University.

The innovation combines water aeration and oxygenation, deduction of water nutrients, soilless cultivation, and aquaculture into one system.

It has been granted “Utility Model Patent” by the SIPO with its official name “Automatic Floating-island-type Purification Device” ( Patent number “zl 201621426762.9)

 

The device is an artificial floating island (AFI) consisting of a round-shaped floating bed in the center and 56 surrounding floating beds in different shapes with gaps in between. The current available size of the AFI is 10x10 m in diameter (which can be increased or reduced according to customers’ demands). The device is suitable for bodies of water with depth of 1 to 3 meters. On the floating beds aquatic vegetables, crops or flowers can be planted, and aquatic animals can be raised beneath.

The device is energy-saving as it works in wind-powered rotation without using electricity. It can rotate with gentle or even light breeze and can resist one-meter-high waves. It can be applied on surface of water bodies, vast as Yangtze River or small as village ponds and even aeration tanks on the farm. It makes water flow and enables water purification.

The rotation helps regulating the water temperature, which is beneficial to the growth of plants on the floating beds and the aquatic animals beneath them. In winter it stirs up the warm water at the bottom, thus postponing water freezing in late winter and enables earlier melting of ice in early spring. And the bottom water stirred up cools the surface water to insure the survival of the plants and the aquatice animals in scorching summer days.

When the AFI rotates, its center bed and the surrounding beds move in the opposite directions, stirring up water flows beneath and making them collide into each other. The flows are pushed up through one gap between any two floating beds , then down in the next gap, and then up again in the still next gap….    Thus, the on-going process accelerates the aeration and oxygenation. The water is purified by the entangled roots of the aquatic plants on the floating beds varying from 5 to 40 centimeters in length. In the rotation, the floating beds "sweep away" the 5-to-40-centimeter-deep surface water which is rich in oxygen and already purified by the plant roots and stir up the underneath unpurified water and mud for the roots of plants to purify and absorb. The AFI thus cures eutrophication of water bodies and reduces mud at the bottom.

The AFI serves as a platform for cultivating various aquatic vegetables and crops, such as water celery, rice, wheat, soybeans, water chestnuts, etc. The mud stirred up provides nutrients for the plants which grow better than their likes on land. Flowers can also be grown on the AFI to make a scenic garden.

The round center floating bed with the pattern of Taiji Fish formed by different colors of rice in the picture highly demonstrates a perfect example of the multi-functions of the AFI. Its rotation saves energy and farmland and helps water purification; the growth of the rice on it increases economic income; and the colorful Taiji Fish pattern provides visual enjoyment as well as embodies the Chinese traditional ideology of harmony

between human and nature.