Recently, oil spill accidents, in which oil spills into seawater, frequently occur due to the collision of oil tankers or the like.
In this case, as is known in the related art, oil-removing treatments include a method of disposing a floating fence (an oil boom) surrounding water contaminants to prevent water contaminants from spreading, submerging absorption cloth in locations in which oil is present, such that the absorption cloth absorbs oil, and then removing oil remains permeated into the absorption cloth, and a method of decomposing water contaminants by spraying an oil treatment agent onto water contaminants.
Here, the method of spraying an oil treatment agent is not used unless an emergency situation has occurred, since this method has a side effect of destroying the marine ecosystem.
As is also known in the art, oil washed up on the coastline is removed by allowing oil remains to adhere to sand or pebbles and then sterilizing sand or pebbles to which oil remains have adhered through heating. However, this method of heating sand and pebbles to which oil remains have adhered also removes marine micro-organisms, which is problematic.
Thus, the most reliable and least problematic method among the existing oil removing methods is to remove oil remains using absorption cloth.
However, the method of removing oil remains using absorption cloth is known as having the problem of low efficiency, since work of removing oil remains from absorption cloth is very difficult and takes a significant amount of time.
In this regard, Korean Patent No. 10-1221579 discloses an apparatus equipped in a vessel for removing green and red algae. The apparatus includes a water introducing part, a water pump, an inline mixer, a chemical introducing part, an electrical cell, a floating and separating bath, a disk filter, an outlet, and a control unit. The water introducing part introduces contaminated water in order to remove floating matter using a filter. The water pump pumps contaminated water through the water introducing part. The inline mixer stirs contaminated water supplied through the water pump. The chemical introducing part introduces chemicals into contaminated water in order to purify contaminated water in the inline mixer. The electrical cell electrically coagulates contaminants in contaminated water and oxidizes and reduces contaminated water. The floating and separating bath allows contaminated water treated in the electrical cell to remain for a predetermined period of time in order to purify contaminated water through chemical reactions, and removes fine particles from contaminated water by floating fine particles upwards, thereby producing a supernatant through floating and separation processing. The disk filter filters fine particulates from the supernatant purified through the floating and separating bath. The supernatant, from which fine particulates are removed through the disk filter, is discharged to the sea through the outlet. The control unit controls contaminated water treatment processing using a programmable logic controller (PLC) program. In this manner, the apparatus for removing green and red algae can remove green algae, red algae, or causative substances of green and red algae from seawater or a source of water supply.
However, this approach of the related art still has the above-described problem in that the ecosystem is destroyed by the oil treatment agent, since contaminants in water are removed by the filter while contaminated water is introduced by the pump, and contaminated water is purified by a chemical agent.
Therefore, there is required an emergency solution able to very easily remove water contaminants without destroying the marine ecosystem in operations of removing water contaminants, such as not only oil but also red algae and green algae.