The artificial fish surrogates should provide information about the flow conditions and expected damage and mortality of fish traveling through turbine installations. To date, up to 450,000 fish are used every year in live animal experiments in German hydroelectric power plants, according to the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment. Those tests, mandated by domestic regulation which enacts a European directive, evaluate the ability of the fish to pass through the turbines and thus assess the fish-friendliness of the plants.

The RETERO research project, "Reducing animal testing to establish risk of injury to fish caused by passage through turbines by the use of robotic surrogates, computational fluid mechanics and predictive modeling”, is funded by the German Federal Government with 1.4 million euros, and started in March 2019. Its objective is to develop partially autonomous robot systems and simulation models that will reduce, and in the long-term eliminate, the need for live fish in experiments.

More information:
http://www.retero.org

Source:
https://idw-online.de/de/news717570