It should be common knowledge that oil spills in the ocean are bad news. This is terrible for wildlife and the environment as a whole, but some cleanup methods are also not necessary. A group of engineers and researchers in Australia have designed a highly adorable robot that can make minimal cleaning quite eco-friendly, while surprisingly reusing and saving oil for use.
It is called “Electronic Dolphin” – a minibot created by engineers RMIT University Specifically to help clean up oil spills in a more effective and environmentally conscious way. In the event of an oil spill, the minibot will be deployed into contaminated waters with several other electronic dolphin friends, with a remote operator directing them to toss the oil into the affected waters. At the tip of the nose of the Dolphin miniboat is a filter material that wears a special coating that forms microscopic sea urchin-like spikes that repel water but absorb oil. A pump inside the housing brings that oil into the cavity and is then stored in the device until emptied. The water remains in the ocean or whatever aquatic environment is being cleaned at the time.
Original Mini Oil Hoovering Bot
in a video Provided with RMIT University paper On the robot, it demonstrates how the filter works with a simple setup” The filter is at the end of a long hose that is fitted into a container to create a vacuum. Another bottle is filled with water and an oily substance. When the vacuum is turned on, the filter is placed in the oil-water solution and begins collecting oil from the water, effectively vacuuming the oil from the surface of the water. According to the paper the minibot is currently detecting an oily contaminant. It is 97 percent effective in cleaning, with a difference of three percent compared to other solutions.
Most oil cleanup solutions tend to add chemicals to the water and oil that help break the oil into smaller droplets, but this can also leach PFA contaminants into the water, according to RMIT University. There’s also the option to burn the oil directly off the surface of the water, which I guess is self-explanatory given how terrible that is for the environment. Clean alternatives exist, such as the use of booms to contain oil spills over a specific area, or skimming, where large boats try to remove oil from the ocean surface. There have even been efforts where they use mats made from human hair, which are naturally great at collecting oil but these are not as effective as their more harmful alternatives.
Yet Minibot does something, besides better cleaning, that none of the existing options really allow. It collects spilled oil which can actually be reused or reused instead of being wasted.
A sea of robots to clean up an oil-filled ocean
RMIT University’s electronic dolphins currently get about a 15-minute charge, and at its current size, cleaning up a major oil spill would require a flock of them running continuously in shifts. I’ve tried to imagine how you operate thousands of these little robots in an oil rig for 15 minutes, bring them back, evacuate them, and then deploy another thousand robots. I may have opened a new nightmare. Luckily researchers are working on ways to improve the charge and capacity of the bot along with using a larger filter to make it more streamlined for use in real emergencies.
The Minibot may not seem like the most practical solution at the moment, but it’s certainly a neat solution, and something that could be used in the future on rigs of any size, especially if they can improve its capacity and charge. If they have these versions ready to go now, engineers and researchers in Australia could use it in a real-world case, such as the oil spill on the Strait of Hormuz caused by leaked tanks and the carnage of the Iran war. The bombing of an Iranian oil refinery during the recent war caused oil spills along the coast on uninhabited Shidwar Island, According to APWhich is a protected breeding ground for the wildlife there under the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. The photos and videos are heartbreaking, and were shared for two months before the actual cleanup began, but the leak spread so much that it Visible from space.
