Hello, we’re here at The Ocean Cleanup’s headquarters.
In this video we’re going to show you what’s going to happen in the coming months,
when we’re going to relaunch our system, and how we’ve upgraded the design.
Now, at The Ocean Cleanup, of course our mission is to rid the world’s oceans of plastic,
and for that we’re focussing on the largest accumulation zone of trash in the world:
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is halfway between Hawaii and California.
Now, last September, we launched our first system, here, from San Francisco,
heading to the Garbage Patch where we arrived in late October,
and in the months that followed we were able to confirm
many of the key assumptions behind the design.
What we saw was that the system was able to go into the U-shape,
that the system was able to orient itself when the direction of the wind changed,
the system was stable in waves,
and we also saw that the system was able to catch and concentrate plastic,
not unimportant for an ocean cleanup system.
However, while we were offshore, we also saw two
what we euphemistically refer to as - “unscheduled learning opportunities”.
Where the first one was that: yes, we saw that the system was catching plastic,
but it was also able to lose the plastic again.
And this was because, basically, the system wasn’t moving fast enough yet
so occasionally the system actually moved slower than the plastic,
which caused the plastic to leave the system again.
Secondly, what we saw was a fatigue fracture of the main floater,
causing this 18-meter end-section to disconnect from the rest of the system,
and this was basically traced back to a stress concentration at the bottom of the system,
and that’s of course something that we hope to avoid with the next offshore campaign as well.
So, after the system came back, and after we concluded the root cause analysis,
results of that can be found on our website by the way,
the engineering team then started to work hard on solutions
and to see how can we mitigate these concerns that we saw with the first campaign.
And today we’re going to show you what we came up with.
So, what we see here is the base configuration
as the system is going to be launched back into the Patch in June.
And the first thing you’ll notice is that the screen isn’t exactly underneath the floater pipe any more,
it’s slightly brought forward.
and the reason for this is that we wanted to completely eliminate this rail connection
that’s at the bottom of the pipe, because that was the eventual cause of the fracture, actually.
So now, we make this interface much easier with just sling connections to the screen, and
and this way we hope to avoid having these stress concentration issues.
The second thing that we’ll be doing on that front
is that we’re removing these heavy stabiliser frames from the design,
these were there to prevent the system from toppling over
because of these heavy electronics on the top of the pipes.
so now what were doing is we actually made the electronics much simpler, much smaller,
so that we can actually get rid of the stabilisers
which obviously didn’t help with the loads on the pipe.
So that was the structural issue.
With regards to the speed issue, that was actually quite tricky to develop a solution for that,
because our initial instinct was, well, let’s just put a big sail on the pipe,
but the problem was there that the loads would just be massive during storms,
you would get roughly five tonnes of force on every meter of sail onto the system.
What would then happen is that the sail would cause the thing to topple over,
you would need very complicated structures to keep it upright,
so that was really a no-go.
And then we thought, well, what if we do the following,
what if we actually disconnect the sail from the floater itself,
and let the sails float by themselves,
and that’s how the idea got born
to use these giant inflatable buoys on the front side of the system,
which kind of tow the system forward, propelled by the force of the wind.
Now, following this design, actually there was still quite some uncertainty.
Will we actually be able to go faster than the plastic always?
So we thought, well, because this is such an important issue, we need a plan B,
and then, this is what we came up with.
So, basically, it doesn’t really matter whether the system goes faster or slower than the plastic.
The key is consistency.
What you want is the system to either always go faster than the plastic, or always go slower.
What you don’t want is: it’s sometimes going faster, sometimes going slower,
which is what we saw during the first campaign with Wilson.
So, as an alternative plan, what we’re bringing with us when we go offshore
is this massive 20-meter diameter parachute,
that we can substitute the buoys with.
And this would actually turn the system around, and rather than always wanting to go faster,
this should allow us to actually always go slower then the plastic,
so let the plastic float into the system like that.
So, we’ll be able to test both offshore, and see which one works best, basically.
Now, obviously, we think these are very interesting mitigation approaches,
but we’re not 100% sure that these things are going to solve the issues that know of,
and on top of that there may be other issues that we don’t even know of yet,
the “unknown unknowns”.
So that’s why it’s so key that we go out there as soon as possible,
so that we can put these things to the test, and continue learning as we go.
So, for that, fortunately, we didn’t just learn technical things during the last offshore campaign,
but we also learned lessons when it comes to the process of innovation,
and this actually led to two things that we’re going to do differently this time.
First of all, we’re slightly shrinking the system.
We’re making it smaller, by a factor of 3.
And the reason for this is that it will allow us to massively speed up the procurement process,
the assembly process, as well as the tow of bringing the system to the patch,
we can sail much faster, thereby allowing us
to really be in the Patch next month, rather than next year.
So, that’s how we aim to speed up the process.
Secondly, we now build the system, or we’re now designing the system
in a way that it’s much more modular, so we can actually make adjustments while we are offshore.
We don’t have to bring the system all the way back to land,
but while we’re offshore we can actually play with things,
we can make it go faster, make it go slower, change the rigging,
change the screen to different types of screens,
and this will massively increase the cycle speed that we can go through, of iterations,
and should lead to reaching proof of technology much faster than we otherwise would.
So, whatever’s going to happen, the next few months are going to be pretty exciting for sure,
and of course we’ll be able to keep you up to date,
so be sure to keep following us on social media.