Apulaster 11| Trash Cleanup

Project Details

Awards & Nominations

Apulaster 11 has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

The Challenge | Trash Cleanup

Oceanic garbage patches are collections of marine debris that come together due to ocean currents; they have devastating effects on ocean ecosystems. Your challenge is to design a mission to help clean up garbage from the ocean!

TRITON

TRITON is aimed at cleaning oceans' water from microplastics' fragments basing on Fionn Ferreira's ingenious experiment.

Apulaster 11

TRITON

TRITON is a machine designed to extract oceans’ water brought by strong marine currents and purify it removing the microplastics’ fragments. This would be achieved thanks to a process based on the 2019 Google Science Fair winner Fionn’s Ferreira’s ingenious experiment.


ABOUT US

‘Apulaster 11’ is a four members team. We are Politecnico di Milano engineering students looking forward to develop TRITON with the purpose of improving life on the Earth for all living beings.


CHALLENGE

Global research estimates that only 8% of the whole oceanic garbage are fragments longer than 5 mm. The rest is composed of microplastics. Microplastics are dangerous for living beings and ecosystems since their size is so small that they can enter the food chain. Now microplastic is everywhere: in the ground we cultivate, in the water we drink, in our bodies. For this we must directly decrease their alarming concentration, especially in seas.


OUR SOLUTION- Meet TRITON

We prototyped a microplastics’ fragments collection system that, thanks to a ferrofluid compound made of oil and magnetite, and an electromagnet is able to remove more than about 85% of the microplastics contained in a water volume. The five-meters-high and four-meter-wide machine would be capable of depurating up to 60 thousand liters of water at a cycle with the use of only 1.5k kg of magnetite/ferrofluid and 7,5 mL of oil per liter of water.


TARGET AREAS

The depurator would be locally situated close to the coast so that all the materials would be refueled by land through trucks and tankers capable of reaching the machine via a dedicated dock and it would be placed on a support structure fixed permanently on the seabed. Geographically worldwide it would be strategically located in the regions most affected by strong marine currents capable of carrying large amounts of water and therefore large quantities of microplastic.


FUTURE

TRITON is ecofriendly designed, it does not harm in any way the aquatic ecosystem of which we deeply care, in fact it respects the environment, both as nature and as animal world.

Since TRITON is adaptable to all oceans, its presence could be extended on a larger scale so that more locations would be able to benefit from its work.


PRESENTATION

For a more detailed and complete technical informations: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1YtMxpA-uzIVnt2wU...


RESOUCES

https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/07/30/irish-teen-wins-2019-google-science-fair-for-removing-microplastics-from-water/#68ea6ed8373f

https://theoceancleanup.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1EAeNdTFHU