Sailing drones to clean oil spills

[Guest]

Sailing the net today Ive found this page (https://sites.google.com/a/opensailing.net/protei/)

Protei is an open project to create sailing drones to clean oil spills from the ocean.

Their sailing drones designs are pretty cool and open for anybody who wants to build them for themselves.

 

I though that it was interesting and wanted to share it with you.

 

Cheers

[Guest]

Interesting, All the way through I was thinking - could you use it to collect plastic? , at the end they answered that.

[wheels 543]

I imediatley thought the same squid. But after taking a look at the sight, I think the idea is nonsense. Re the plastic "garbage patch" it's microscopic particles anyway. You can not actually see it in the water. So how do you sift that out of the "soup". Re oil, so you send this craft out, how does it know where to go and what happens to it after it is full??? It floats around adding itself to the pollution out there and what is worse, it now is dragging around a collected quanity of Oil.

[Guest]

They would have to be programmed to come home after a while??? Maybe load them with incendiaries??? KM would help design that.

[Guest]

About where to go to collect, they say in the website that the drone is equipped with a gps and is being programmed to follow waypoints (of the affected area), but that it will make its own decisions about how to go from one waypoint to the other (always in order).

 

I guess the question about what it does when is full is a good one, didnt see anything about it.

 

Regarding plastic, yes, I guess it would be difficult, but Im sure scientist somewhere are already working on ways to filter it out of the water with minimum side effects

[w44vi 17]

Maybe load them with incendiaries??? KM would help design that.

KM would have to organize a meeting with OSH and the Tax man

[wheels 543]

Hell no. We simply don't tell OSH. We have the view that it is Always easier to ask forgivness than permission.

[Grinna 2]

Filtering mocroscopic bits of plastic out would require also filtering microscopic organisms out of the water and seeing as microscopic organisms are the building blocks of the whole ocean food web then you're going to start having adverse effects ... unless of course, you're not covering a big enough volume to make an impact .... in which case, you're not being very effective against the plastic.

 

Removing gross litter (large bits of plastic like bottle tops and beer can ties and milk bottle rings) isn't so much of a challenge ... though you'd have to be able to deal with nets or sieves clogging with algae and stuff. You'd need thousands of the suckers out there sailing around to have any impact on the litter issue though.

 

Interesting concept ...... not quite sure how to make it work well in practice.

[Guest]

We were discussing plastic in th eocean this morning, and after I told her most of it comes through the stormwater system she asked - why not a big chicken wire grill type thingy on every outlet and catch the stuff before it hits the water.

 

Do we have anything like that? If not how hard would it be to install?

[PaulR 3]

West end of Mission Bay and on a creek near the Glen Innes Pools both have raft type thing to collect rubbish before it enters the harbour.

 

Okahu Bay, Mission Bay and Kohimarama beaches are all cleaned by a tractor drawn conveyer machine that lifts sand + rubbish off the beach, the sand falling back onto the beach and the rubbish carried up into a trailer for removal.

 

Both systems seem to be very simple and efficient.

[Grinna 2]

A floating boom type arrangement would possibly be quite good to trap a lot of the gross litter. The problem with a chicken wire strainer fitted to a stormwater pipe is that when it clogs up with rubbish the water will back up and you'll get overflows and flooding and all kinds of other mayhem further back along the system (some of them are marginal enough in their capacity and overflows as it is).

 

The other problem is that the strainer type arrangement is also pretty likely to trap all the tasty bits in the raw sewage overflows that occur in heavy rain (rain water infiltrates the sewer lines and exceeds capacity and it overflows into the stormwater system and then raw sewage goes down the stormwater pipes onto the beaches). Cleaning those screens would be a real nice job

 

Some stormwater outlets have steel bars set up as a coarse screening arrangement to prevent gross litter from getting out, but in the last few years there have been education campaigns to try and prevent litter from getting into the stormwater system in the first place (hence all those blue "Drains to sea" signs spray painted next to drains). Ideally you want to stop the crap getting in there to start with ..... but obviously you need to try and catch the stuff that does find its way down the drains too.