The Ocean Cleanup announced that it will re-deploy the revamped System 001/B last week. Specifically, the system is scheduled to arrive at the test scene on June 25. The system halted operations as it faced a couple of challenges.
The announcement of commence of operations was conducted via Twitter, with the Ocean Cleanup commenting
After only four months of design, procurement, and assembly, the crew is now on their way to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with the upgraded System 001/B.
The team behind the project, collected data and analyzed them in order to understand what caused the t wo problems, which are:
- The system hasn’t been able to retain the plastic it caught;
- The floater suffered from a structural failure, causing an 18-meter end section to disconnect from the rest of the system, just before the end of 2018.
Therefore, the Ocean Cleanup published a report to explain the results of the analysis.
The Ocean Cleanup confirmed many key assumptions of the design, but also encountered two unscheduled learning opportunities during the period – the system did not maintain a sufficient speed, allowing plastic to exit the system, and a stress concentration caused a fatigue fracture in the HDPE floater.
In mid-January 2019, the Wilson system completed its 800-mile journey and arrived in Hilo Bay, Hawaii.
