Fresh By Design delivered a custom educational seaweed culture and life support system for Frankston Tech School (Chisholm Institute), designed to support hands-on learning while reflecting real-world aquaculture practices.
The system provides students with a practical platform to explore seaweed cultivation, water quality management and marine system operation in a safe, flexible teaching environment.
The installation combines a modular bench-mounted culture system, mobile life support, and an external seawater storage and filtration system. Together, these components allow the system to operate either as a recirculating setup or with fresh truck-delivered seawater, depending on teaching requirements. All systems were supplied, installed, commissioned and documented by Fresh By Design.
The system had to suit an educational setting – safe, intuitive operation by students and staff, clear system layout and labelling, easy reconfiguration to suit different learning outcomes, and reliable, low-maintenance equipment selection.
A custom FRP seaweed bench with bunded containment, overhead gantry, lighting, seawater supply and aeration; a range of interchangeable acrylic culture tanks allowing flexible layouts for different experiments; programmable full-spectrum LED lighting to support seaweed growth and observation; a mobile filtration and life support unit incorporating mechanical and biological filtration, UV sterilisation, heating, chilling and aeration; and an external 3,000 L seawater reservoir system with bag filtration and UV sterilisation for storing and conditioning trucked seawater.
The completed installation provides Frankston Tech School with a robust and adaptable teaching system that bridges the gap between classroom learning and real-world aquaculture operations, demonstrating Fresh By Design’s capability to deliver professional-grade aquatic systems tailored for education and research environments.
