Innovations often require elaborated experimental work. IMARES is able to provide the right environment for each experimental setting. Next to small-scale experiments, pilot scale experiments can be conducted at the facilities of IMARES. State of the art indoor and outdoor facilities are available for fish, shellfish and algae culture.
The culture systems are similar to full-scale facilities employed by commercial farms. This allows to provide experimental results with can easily be scaled-up to commercial size. These facilities include recirculation aquaculture systems that handle more than 15kg feed a day, tanks of several diameters (more than 3.5meter) and shapes (round to rectangular).
Furthermore algae raceways (see picture), stagnant ponds and several other systems are at disposal. An extensive storage of high quality saltwater allows conducting flow-through experiments at different temperatures on larger scale (60m³/day at virtually every temperature). These experimental alternatives allow testing results obtained on meso- or micro-scale on pilot size but as well to realize experimental set-ups in a commercial scale environment.