An Onboard Air Conveyer Oil Skimmer
A high power air conveyer oil skimming system and implementation on a real oil recovery vessel are presented. Port and Airport Research Institute (PARI) has succeeded in development of a new type of onboard oil recovery system. Development of the project has been in cooperation with the Shikoku Regional Bureau, Ministry of Land Infrastructure and Transport Japan (MLIT). The system employs a high-power vacuum blower for sucking liquid in gas-liquid multiphase form. Its applicability to an onboard oil recovery system has been experimentally investigated. The experiments have shown that the method can respond to the wide range of viscosity of the spilled oil and works well even in wavy sea condition. These results have been applied to the oil skimming system mounted on ISHIZUCH - an oil recovery vessel owned and operated by MLIT recently refitted by Mitsui Engineering & Shipbuilding Co., LTD
Simulation Tank for Oil Recovery in Marine Situations (STORMS) and Its R&D
This article is an overview of the Simulation Tank for Oil Recovery in Marine Situations (STORMS) which the Port and Airport Research Institute (PARI) operate; and related research activities conducted in the STORMS. Oil spills may still cause severe environmental and economic damage. Research works into responding to such incidents are important to prevent or minimize damage. STORMS is a seawater test tank specially designed for oil spill response and was built in 2004. The tank is as large so as to test full scale oil skimmers and can simulate various situations in which any oil recovery mission may actually encounter at sea; this includes wave, current, temperature, as well as wind. Over the last 4-years of operation, the facility has played an important role in oil spill research and response engineering in Japan. This article also present an example of developments carried out in STORMS, such as the high oil concentration weir skimmer.
Fully Integrated Bidirectional CMOS-MEMS Flow Sensor With Low Power Pulse Operation
Leveraging More-than-Moore technology, we demonstrate an integrated CMOS MEMS flow sensor via a very compact system on chip (SoC) that can sense the bidirectional N2 gas flow. Our SoC features a very low-noise instrumentation amplifier that is implemented on a CMOS wafer and serves as a readout integrated circuit for a thermoresistive micro-calorimetric flow sensor which is fabricated on a MEMS wafer. A compact heterogeneous integration is achieved by combining the two wafers via the proprietary InvenSense AlN process. The measured sensitivity of our CMOS MEMS flow sensor is 98 mV/sccm which is three times better than the state-of-the-art counterpart. The flow range measured by our SoC is from −26 to 26 m/s (from −50 to 50 sccm). Moreover, the pulsed heater operation makes this proposed SoC flow sensor a very low power (<9 mW) and, thus, a promising candidate for the Internet-of-Things applications in smart home/green buildings.