Quantitative analysis of shore-line protection by boom arrangements

Abstract The objective of this paper is to quantitatively analyze the arrangement of booms to improve their effectiveness in protecting natural resources. The boom arrangements tested were parallel booms placed at angles of 60°, 90°, and 120° to the shore-line. It was found that the angle between the shoreline and the parallel booms was effective in the range of 45° and 75° for all velocities. The arrangement that was found to be particularly effective was principally a set of three parallel booms placed at an angle of 60° to the shore-line with cylinders placed along the center-line. The open channel experiment was carried out for four different flow velocities, ranging from 0.2 to 0.7 knot. For each speed the position of the parallel booms and the size of the cylinders were changed. Cylinder sizes varied from 4.5 to 7.5 cm. A volume analysis was performed to determine the volume of oil contained. The variation of the length scales for the position of the parallel booms and the size of the cylinders were used to determine the optimum position for the parallel booms and the optimum cylinder diameter for each velocity. A relationship of effectiveness vs U 2 /gR was found which displayed a maximum. This relationship was tested experimentally with random parameters, and verified. With a particular velocity U, the graph may be used to find the optimum radius R for the cylinders to be used. The maximum in the relationship can be explained as follows: for cylinders with smaller diameters the effectiveness increases with increase in diameter because of the increased contribution of the centrifugal forces. A maximum is reached because of the physical relationship between the cylinder diameter and the channel width.