For those who don’t know Ocean Cleanup is a genius idea of removing all the plastic from the ocean using natural currents, by a Young Dutch Entrepreneur named Boyan Slat.
Why move through the ocean, if the ocean can move through you?
Ocean garbage patches are vast but dispersed. By acting like an artificial coastline, their array passively concentrates the plastic by orders of magnitude, 100% powered by natural ocean currents.
The Ocean Cleanup has deployed a 100 meter-long barrier segment in the North Sea, 23 km off the coast of The Netherlands, where it will remain for one year. Is the first time their barrier design is being put to the test in open waters.
OBJECTIVE
The prototype will show how The Ocean Cleanup’s floating barrier fares in extreme weather at sea – the kind of conditions the system will eventually face when deployed in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
The Ocean Cleanup’s technology makes use of long floating barriers which act as an artificial coastline, passively catching and concentrating ocean debris, powered by the ocean’s natural currents. Because the barriers are at the surface of the ocean, it will be subjected to the most extreme conditions, and hence it’s of paramount importance to test the barriers in those conditions.
THE PROTOTYPE
To investigate the survivability of the design, they deployed a full-scale barrier segment in the North Sea.
At this test site, conditions during a minor storm are more severe than those in exceptionally heavy storms (occurring once every 100 years) in the Pacific Ocean.
Sensors will track every motion of the prototype and the loads it is subjected to. The data gathered will enable engineers to develop a system fully resistant to severe conditions during the cleanup of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
ITERATING TOWARDS EXECUTION
When they discover something on the prototype has malfunctioned or is broken, the part would be adjusted. If that new design solves the problem, the design has advanced, and if not, something else will be tested.
This is how they will iteratively get to a design they believe is suitable for the 2017 Pilot installation, and ultimately, for the cleanup of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 2020.
Learn more here: www.theoceancleanup.com