Beach Surface Cleanup: Another Idea

Gulf Oil Spill Beach Clean-Up

Gulf Oil Spill Beach Clean-Up 

By Corporal Willy, June 28th 2010.

    The Engineering.com Eagle Team, composed of dedicated members that are providing solutions to the Gulf Oil Spill, has re-directed its focus to the beach cleanup and surface oil still floating freely.  Since most attempts at ideas and suggestions to cure the sick Horizon Well Bore, Casing and BOP have been suggested already we are now putting our energies into other areas.  We won’t abandon anything we have come up with so far that has already been noticed by the Horizon Support Staff, the White House and the EPA.  They are well formulated ideas and suggestions.  You can read about them on this web site.

     So now that we are directing our ideas on the massive cleanup that must take place we are getting ideas together.  I’m doing my best to understand those ideas and to model them in SolidWorks.  Then I take screen shots of them so our members and non members around the world can get the “picture” quicker along with a brief description.  It is my intention to post one idea here now that actually was proposed in a simple emailed description by Mr. Robert Crawford, one of our Eagle Team Members that I quickly got going on.  The problem was that I interpreted his idea wrong.  I had put in a lot of time on it and after I found out that I got it wrong, I continued along with it because it was getting its own designed personality.  So I respectfully submit this one and will continue on with Mr. Crawford’s idea which is also a very good one.

     In a nutshell this proposed solution was for the beaches, marshlands or wetlands.  I’ve seen pictures of many people working with shovels, rakes and plastic disposal bags, collecting and bagging this sticky gooey mess.  Slow and tedious work so I thought this design would make things go better and faster.  Simply described it would use a wide shag carpet with very long looped fibers to intertwine with the sticky gooey globs and blobs and transfer it to the top of the Blob Glob Sled.  While at the top it would be squeezed and scraped off and then eventually wind up in the large Blob Glob Sled Catch Pan.  I tried duplicating these globs and blobs in the desert here with SAE 30 weight oil.  It didn’t work because it was not crude oil but refined oil and the desert drank it up before I could make those globs and blogs of my own to test my idea with.  I should have known the desert would not be fussy about what it drank in the 108 degree temperatures.  Yes, I did dig up all that soil and dispose of it properly.  Here is the idea more fully explained in pictures.

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     I cannot test it here in the desert but maybe all those working now on the cleanup of the beaches, wet lands and marshlands will.  This is dragged by an ATV or All Terrain Vehicle.  I hope it works and most of all if it does, I hope they use it.  Corporal Willy.