Abstract
The Ocean Cleanup Foundation is developing floating barrier systems to concentrate and extract buoyant plastic from the global accumulation zones. In that context, two cleanup systems have been designed, built and deployed in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch since 2018 to evaluate their performance in the field for which a large amount of data has been collected. This data serves to validate and calibrate numerical models that will be used to develop future generations of cleanup systems.
The main performance indicator in scrutiny is the field efficiency which can be derived from on the one hand the barrier horizontal motion in terms of displacement and span heading and on the other hand the plastic transport around and inside the barrier. After a first part dedicated to the presentation of the experimental campaign carried out to evaluate the field efficiency of the second cleanup system, this second part is dedicated to the presentation of some results and analysis performed to evaluate the interception efficiency.
This paper first focuses on the cross comparison of two measurement techniques to evaluate the barrier span length and heading, second the metocean models in terms of waves and wind are presented and compared against the available metocean measurements. Then, a multi-linear model is proposed to evaluate the barrier dynamics from the background metocean conditions and applied to the analysis of the barrier in the lifting bag configuration. Finally, the multi-linear model is compared to measured relative speed for all the drifter tests carried out in the campaign the whole test campaign.
