Posted on 09/06/2010 2:28:00 AM PDT by CutePuppy
Seaswarm, an autonomous, solar-powered skimmer, may be the answer to less expensive and more efficient methods for cleaning up future oil spills. The robot prototype promises to absorb 20 times its weight in oil.
Created by researchers at MIT’s Senseable City Lab, Seaswarm employs a conveyor belt of absorbent, nanowire mesh. The specially deigned mesh can suck up oil on the water’s surface and then process and dispose of the oil it’s collected. The Seaswarm can continue to absorb more of the spill while the robot autonomously navigates and cleans the ocean for weeks on end.
Researchers claim that 5,000 Seaswarm robots could clean up an area the size of the recent Gulf oil spill in about a month. Operating around the clock, a swarm of these relatively inexpensive, autonomous skimmers could constantly consume and dispose of oil without human intervention.
Compare this to the 800 conventional skimmers deployed earlier this summer in the Gulf of Mexico which needed to constantly return to the shore for maintenance and in the end were only able to collect an estimated 3 percent of the massive spill.
The first Seaswarm prototype was tested earlier this month on the Charles River in Eastern Massachusetts.
“We envisioned something that would move as a ‘rolling carpet’ along the water and seamlessly absorb a surface spill,” said Senseable City Lab Associate Director Assaf Biderman in a statement.
“This led to the design of a novel marine vehicle: a simple and lightweight conveyor belt that rolls on the surface of the ocean, adjusting to the waves,” Biderman said.
Most of Seaswarm’s 16-foot-long, 7-foot-wide design is composed of its conveyer belt. The rest is reserved for a solar panel section at the front for self-propulsion. The conveyer belt is covered with a special fabric created by MIT Visiting Associate Professor Francesco Stellacci.
Previously featured in a paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, this nanowire fabric can absorb up to 20 times its own weight in oil, while repelling water. When the material is saturated, it heats up and burns off the oil it’s collected, leaving the nanofabric available to absorb more oil.
Researchers explain that the Seaswarm units detect the edge of a spill and move inward. They are designed to use wireless communication and GPS to manage their coordinates and ensure an even distribution over a spill site.
While a single vehicle could clean an entire site autonomously, the swarm behavior of the robots allows several vehicles to work together in a coordinated effort for faster cleaning.
A Seaswarm prototype is currently on display at the Venice Biennale’s Italian Pavilion—an international art, music, and architecture festival. The theme of this year’s festival addresses how nanotechnology will change the way we live in 2050.
But if we did that, there wouldn’t be an excuse for a drilling ban, the crippling of several domestic industries, massive job loss, profits for liberal cronies and Draconian enviro-legislation.
Obviously it’s a terrible idea.
And think of all the carbon dioxide that burning this extra oil, after it has been harvested from the water, would give to the globull warming. An absolute disaster!
Have a boom that circles the ship and is attached. If something happens, the boom is deployed by compressed air and circles the ship from 100ft out.
This holds the oil inside an area until something can be done. Like tossing a couple of skimmers in.
In the event of a hurricane, what? In the event of a passing ship, what? In the event they get lost or lose the radio connection, what?
A few suggested improvements: When two of these things meet, can they mate and reproduce? Can they put the collected oil in barrels and sell it? Will they automatically wire the profits to my PayPal account?
You mean robots could do in a month what it took microbes to do in a week?
It didn’t happen in a week. We still had plenty of marsh areas in Louisiana that were devastated but these could be a great first line of defense to get the surface stuff that would get to shore.
Again, need is the mother of invention, not government. The only better mousetrap ever devised by the federal government was incumbent politicians.
Being facetious of course. I’m not thinking of the robots themselves afire, but the ultimate fate of the oil that they collect (it does get added to the refinery input stream, doesn’t it?) And only Al Gore would care.
Were there any after action reports on the effectiveness of the machines Kevin Costner was using?
The report says the unit processes the oil onboard. I assumed that meant there would be no oil to collect afterward. Could be wrong.
Reproduction... In development. First item on the list.
Progress report: Day Six is done, Day Seventeen still in development. "Apple" is the difficult part.
Can they put the collected oil in barrels and sell it?
Progress report: Harvesting part is done. Packaging and selling part still in development.
Will they automatically wire the profits to my PayPal account?
Good idea. Automation of profits distribution added to "in development" list.
Yes. Kevin Costner and his brother's skimmer and separation technology got a lot of publicity but his machine was not really that different or that efficient compared to some designs, particularly EuroSkimmer, production of which was abandoned for lack of need years ago, or Cousteau's Ecosphere Technolgies machines.
Building on 1970's EuroSkimmer's idea, MIT design goes much further in utilizing today's technologies. Only cheaper and more efficient, while being mostly self-sustained and more absorbent and even more active (not passive, as Costner's or similar boom and filtration designs).
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/euroskimmer/index?tab=articles - Euroskimmer
Read more about disadvantages of Costner's design (including expensive price relative to more efficient technologies):
Cousteau Says Technology Can Clean Gulf Oil Now - FR / CNBC, 2010 June 18
Shelved Oil Spill Cleanup Invention Could Have Helped In Gulf - FR / TEP, 2010 June 10
See post #13 on how it was done with Euroskimmer. MIT design uses far more advanced rechnology, but based on similar idea.
My "prediction" in June:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2531936/posts?page=2#2 - Shelved Oil Spill Cleanup Invention Could Have Helped In Gulf - FR, 2010 June 10
I think that with new technologies, the cleanup of this mess will take much less time and cause far less sustained ecological (but probably not economic, due to its location close to wider and more populated coastline) damage than the equivalent of Exxon-Valdez. Engineers of BP and other companies will do most of the work, but Obama and Democrats will take the credit for successes and "kicking ass".
The biggest factor was the "environment" itself. For instance, depending on the direction and wind strength, a tropical storm or hurricane could either help disperse the spill over the large sea area or help gather it in a few large messy "bins" not far from the shores. The natural sea motion, helped by some of the dispersant action, was the biggest factor in the more benign environmental outcome.
From Shelved Oil Spill Cleanup Invention Could Have Helped In Gulf - FR / TET, 2010 June 10:
With typical Norwegian pragmatism and great foresight an engineer and inventor named Jan Sverre Christensen created the Euroskimmer. The device had to be built to handle a wide range of oil viscosities and rough seas and do so actively in the spill itself. No other device does what the Euroskimmer was designed to do. Attention has recently been paid to the actor Kevin Costner, Costner's scientist brother, and their Costner Industries centrifuge. But this centrifuge is nothing more than a separator pump that passively sits on a barge and waits for the oil spill to come to it, with an unproven ability to gather and separate oil viscosities of any consistency, from a thin film to a “chocolate mousse.” The system of booms employed by the Coast Guard is also passive, is only effective in calm water, and the skimming process used does a poor job of separating oil from water. ..... The design of the Euroskimmer was as dynamic as it was simple. ..... But the true secret and success of the device was the “disc-adhesion” system that collected the floating oil like flypaper, the discs then spun like a wool on a spindle-whorl, thus separating oil from the seawater, and the collected materials were then discharged back through the hose to a base ship that stored the oil. ..... ..... That was in 1976, or one full year ahead of Norway’s first blowout in the Ekofisk Bravo Platform, which on April 22, 1977, gushed 28,000 barrels per day until the underwater gusher was capped one week later. With heavy seas breaking up the spill, an environmental disaster was avoided.
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