Oil Skimmer RC Boat For Oil Spills

Download Project Document/Synopsis

Accidental Oil spills from tankers and ships contribute to 15 percent of the oil entering the ocean every year. Oil tankers and ships have spilled over 6 billion tonnes of oil into our seas since 1970. Such oil spills have very harmful impacts including

Death and harm to sea creatures.
Heavy damage to marine plant life.
Makes seafood unsafe to consume.
Hinders shipping routes and fishing industry.
Heavy losses of oil shipment lost.
Risk of fire during cleaning operations.

Well the only solution to minimize this damage is to instantly lean up on oil spills the moment they happen. Well cleaning of oil spills require heavy and specialized machinery and ships that cannot be made available to oil spill locations as soon as a spill occurs. Also there is a chance of files when driving large machinery through oil spilled waters.
Well we here propose to develop a small rc drone boat than works as an oil skimmer to separate oil from water. A swarm of such small drones working together can get rid of oil spills while also being able to recover the oil spilled.

The rc oil skimmer boat brings following advantages:
RC Controlled Operation
Onboard oil Separator System
Easy to Carry Portable Boat Drones for instant cleaning
Ability to recover oil spilled over the sea
Low cost RC boats for Cleaning Oil Spills

The rc drone is controlled by a dc motor propelled system with 2x rudders with user making use of an RC remote to operate the boat. The rc boat is integrated with an on-board oil skimmer system that separates oil from the water and collects it in a different tank. This allows to not only clean the oil but also recover it from the ocean.

Here is how the on board oil separator system works:

Water is collected through Collector Inlet
This is driven to separator tank using DC Pumps
Now the Separator has 2 partitions
Oil & Water Viscosity Leads oil to float on top
This is used to collect oil in right side chamber
This oil is now pumped through outlet pump
Separated water is thrown back through Water outlet pipe

This separated oil is now collected in the oil tank located at the back of the RC boat. The water inlet collectors that are used to collect water and oil are integrated with steel mesh to filter out garbage or sea creatures from entering the pump.

The user uses an RC remote to send control commands wirelessly to the rc boat. An onboard receiver receives these commands and a microcontroller is used to process these commands and drive the DC motor in order to create a drive. It uses a servo motor with 2 X rudder system to achieve directional movement.

Thus the RC boat swarm allows for a safer and futuristic way to deal more effectively with oil spills. With 10 Litre Oil carrying capacity in each boat, each RC boat can collect over 60 Litres of oil in an hour. With over 100 such RC boats we can clean and recover 6000 litres of oil in an hour and around 72000 Litres of oil in 12 Hours.