Project Details

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!

Trash Cleanup

The aim of this project is to find a way of removing plastic from the ocean. An existing technology has been analyzed and some improvements have been proposed in order to reduce the pollution.

SpainX

Using as base project the system named The Ocean Cleanup, we have modified it in order to reduce the number of travels required to clean the ocean. To sum up, their system accumulates trash in front of the system and when the sensors located in the structure detect that there is enough debris, a boat is required to go and retire all that trash.

Our improvements consist in once the sensors detect too much debris, the system deploys a net which will contain a lot of debris. When this net is full, the system closes and keeps the previous net near. This can done with as many nets as the developers want to include in the system and once there are not nets empty for use, a boat must go to pick up the trash and put some empty nets. With this, the total number of travels is reduced.

However, the more filled nets, the more speed will have the structure, so it is necessary to counteract this problem and a way of doing this is adjusting automatically the parachute aperture, so it slows down the system.

Regarding to animals, the shape and velocity of this technology make easy that the different species can avoid to be caught.

The resources used are: