2001 Volume 16 Pages 231-238
This paper describes development of a floating canopy system for farm ponds as a new application of geomembranes. At farm ponds without a roof, occurrence of waterbloom or deposition of garbage and fallen leaves cause troubles on the operation and maintenance. To improve these situations, additional construction demand of the roof for existing farm ponds has increased. These farm ponds, however, are not designed as the structure whose roof can be constructed. Therefore, the application of conventional roof construction methods poses the problems such as structure, bearing capacity and cost. To solve these problems, we developed a floating canopy system using geomembranes, which have two characteristics of flexibility and low specific gravity. This new system hardly applies new load to existing farm ponds. In addition, the system reduces the cost compared with the conventional roof model. In the development process, we executed the laboratory experiments of several types of floating canopy system, and selected the best structural type. Then we conducted field tests at a farm pond actually used to evaluate the usefulness of this system.
