Development of a handy Oil-skimmer

Masamitsu TATSUGUCHI ", Masaahiro MlZUTANl *I, Masayosi S A N 0 'I, Masayuki FUDO 'I,
Hajime ISHIDA ') and lsamu Fujita 4'

The Japan Workvessel association

2-9-7 Yaesu Chuo-ku Tokyo, 104-0028 Japan
tatsuquchi@s-iwa.or.iD

*) Takamatsu Port and Airport Technical Investigation Office, Shikoku Regional Bureau,
Ministry of Land Infrastructure and Transport Japan
1-6-1 Bancho Takamatsu, 760-0017 Japan

3' Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Technology, Kanazawa University

2-40-20 Kodatsuno Kanazawa. 920-8867 Japan

4'Port and Airport Research Institute

3-1-1 Nagase Yokosuka, 239-0826 Japan

Abstract - Recently marine-pollution by investigated in various simulated situations in this study. It

high-viscous oil leaked from wrecked ships has been
becoming a remarkable problem in the world. Japan
government is renewing old oil recovery vessels with
new concept. The oil recovery vessels are available
on the open sea, but unworkable in a narrow space. We
have developed a handy oil recovery system which is
portable and used for supplementing the weak point of
the oil recovery vessel. The system consists of a water
jet oil-skimmer and a gravity oil/water separator. The oil
skimmer has a high-pressure water jet pump inside the
suction mouth and a long shaft which is used as a
conduit of the recovered fluid as well as a
spring-hanging device which enables an operator t o
easily manipulate it from the deck of the ship. After
3-year research and experiments, we have completed
the system successfully. The system will be soon
installed on our oil recovery vessels.
I. Introduction
Japan is surrounded by seas and always being
potentially threatened by oil spill accidents. So there are
more than 100 oil recoveryvessels on standby. Generally
large oil recovery vessels are poor in maneuverability,
some supplemental equipment such as a handy
oil-skimmer is desirable to sweep residual oil patches that
the main system fails to recover. Although there have been
a number of handy oil-skimmers developed and brought on
the market so far, these kinds of skimmers. which are
unavailable for high-viscous oil or doesn't work well on the
wavy sea surface, are unsuitable for our purpose. We have
developed a new type of handy oil-skimmer, which is
available for broad range of viscosity oil and is easily
handled from the ship's deck. The key concept of the
system is a water-jet pump employed to suck and transfer
the oil patches from the sea surface. The water-jet
oil-skimmer is advantageous to recover the high-viscosity
oil. The water-jet pump has a very strong shear flow which
breaks adhesive oil patches into small particles and
disperses them in the water flow resulting in drastic
decrease of the friction loss in the pipe. Its basic
performance and applicability have been experimentally
has been proven that the system we have developed works
very well with the high-viscosity oil on the wavy sea surface
We have also developed two variations of handy
oil-skimmer to expand the application to other oil spill
situations including the oil recovery in the harbor facilities or
beach cleaning and so on.
11. Concept of a handy oil-skimmer
A man-powered oil recovery mission using buckets or
ladles is dirty and heavy work. It was reported that it took a
day for one volunteer worker to recover about one oil drum
of high-viscous oil in "Nahotoka" oil spill accident.
Especially when the mission includes lifting the oil from the
sea surface to the deck of the ship, work is so hard beyond
description that the worker can't go on the job more than
several minutes. But if the lifling can be mechanized, the
work load shall be remarkably saved and the recovery
efficiency is expected to be drastically improved. For this
purpose, the system should satisfy or consider the following
requirements or conditions:
Portability-.. The system should be light in weight and
easy to handle so as to allow the operator to carry and
move it and continue workfor a long time.
Oil viscosify range---The system should recover
various types of spilled oil from low viscosity to high
viscosity.
Sea condifion---The system should work well not only
on the calm water but also on the rough water.
Recovery rate--The oil recovery rate is generally an
important factor for the. oil-skimmers. But for the
supplemental use to support the main oil recovery
system, the suction rate of 2m3/hr is enough for
recovering the small oil patches scattered around the
oil recovery vessels that the main oil recovery system
can't retrieve.
On the other hand, handy oil-skimmers now available
on the market are classified as Table 1 [I]. Skimmers

0-7803-8669-8/04/$20.00 02004 IEEE. - 1464 -

categorized in (3) can be light and handled easily, but they
are not suitable for high-viscous oil. Those in the category
(4) can suck high-viscosity oil, but a large amount of air is
required as shown in 121, so that it is dmicuit to make the
system portable. Members in (l), which can cope with the
high-viscosity oil, but inevitably have relatively large mass
in the skimmer-head and are not suitable for our purpose.
So we selected type ( 2 ) as the best candidate to be able to
satisfy all the requirements. A water jet pump has a very
simple mechanism as shown in Fig.1. The principle of the
water jet pump is that vacuum is induced around high
velocity water. in Fig.1, high-pressure water is supplied
through the pipe for driving water and injected into the pipe
for recovered oillwater in a high speed. In the gap between
the two pipes, vacuum is induced and oil in the
skimmer-head is withdrawn into the pipe for recovered
oil/water. The skimmer-head is used for gathering oil on
water surface effectively. Due to its simplicity, the system is
expected to have light weight as weii as hydrodynamic
effect such as the friction loss reduction described in the
previous section.
Table 1. Types of portable oil-skimmer
Location of pumping
A.. *I. Pumping method
"r"JCr
Skimmer-head Mechanical pump (1)
Other position
7
7
Jet pump I Ejector
Vacuum (Single phase)
(2)
(3)
Vacuum (Multi phase) &
/ Water nozzle
Fig.1 Mechanism of a waterjet pump
Ill. Elements of the system
In this chapter, detailed information about each
component or results of the performance tests are given.
A. Development of a handy oil-skimmer
(7) Testing-modelof a bandy oil-skimmer
Fig.2 shows the model of a handy oil-skimmer we used
in performance tests. It has two pipe shafts. The main
shaft is used for transferring recovered oiUwater and fitted
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with a handle for easy operation. The thin sub-shaft is
used for feeding high-pressure water to drive the jet pump.
The total length is about 3.4m. which was determined
expecting that the system will be used on a large oil
recovery vessel with 1.6m freeboard.
Oil-recovering capacity is not necessary to be so large,
so we set a minimum target point at 2m31hr. Maximum
pressure of driving water is designed at 4 MPa considering
safety for the workers in case of an accidental rupture
happening on the high-pressure line. Fig3 shows suction
rate change depending on driving-water-pressure. Pumping
rate is about 6000 IWhr of pure water when the pressure of
the driving water is at 4 Mpa.
To know the shape of the skimmer-head suitable for
the system we carried out oil-recovering experiments using
three kinds of basic skimmer-heads and four kinds of
modified types. The test models of the handy oii-skimmer
were made of aluminum. The main shaft is 40" in
diameter and the sub-shafl is 20" in diameter. We
selected 3 types of basic skimmer-head shown in Fig.4
from many ideas and carried out oil-recovering experiments.
The skimmer-head type 1 is trumpet type and type 2 is pan
type. These two types have their mouth opening downward.
Type 3 is dustpan type having oil-holding space. Suffix -1
and -2 show deference of volume of oil-holding space.
Fig2 Testing-model of a handy oil-skimmer
*Nozzle dia. 1.93" -Nozzle dia. 2.02mm
8000
7000
$ 6000
2 5000
4000
2x 3000
sm 2000
1000
U
C L O
5
n
0 1 2 3 4 5
Driving water pressure MPa
Fig.3 pumping capacityldriving water pressure
 p oii viscosity xlOOOmPa s
ocalmwater, W O O ocalmwater, 200jp
uwavywater,p<200 owavywater,200$p
6 00
m
5 5w
!5
2 400
8
L
,
* 300
Type 1-1 Type 1-2 Type 2 Type 3-1 Type 3-2
aa, % 2w
zs
s 100

Fig.4 Shape of the 3 basic skimmer-heads E ow

type type type type type type type
1-1 1-2 2 3-1 3-2 3 3 3-4
(2) Oil-recovering experiments Type of skimmer-head
We carried out oil-recovering experiments using
high-viscous emulsified oil which is made of bunker-C oil
and water. Fig5 shows scene of oil-recovering test on a Fig.6 The result of oil-recovering test
wavy water surface in a test tank. Viscosity is about 1 x105
to 10x105 mPa.s. The test result is shown in Fig.6. The
Skimmer-head (type 3)
horizontal axis shows '"Type of skimmer-head" The vertical
axis shows "Relative oil-recovering ability" of each type I t w a v v water.uc200.000mPa.s I
skimmer-head (quantity of recovered net oil). The base is -&-wavywater, 200.000mPa.s<~
type 1-1, calm water and oil viscosity p<200,000mPa.s. 6 , i

Test result shows that type 3-1 is better than type 1 or type
2 and volume of the temporary storage affects
oil-recovering ability. The reason seems to be as follows.
The type 3 skimmer-head has a temporary oil storage,
which enables the jet pump to continue to suck the oil even
while the skimmer-head fails to catch the water surface. To
the contrary, in the case of type 1 or type 2, without the
temporary oil storage, the sound sucking action takes place I

only when the skimmer-head is properly submerged under a 01 1

the water surface and fails once the skimmer-head is
exposed to the air. This control is very difficult especially in
the wavy surface. The volume of the temporary storage
also affects the recovery performance. Figure 7 gives their
relation. The oil recovery sequence using the type 3
skimmer-head is basically a repetition of ladling the oil
patches and sucking by the jet pump. As mentioned above,
the jet pump loses the sucking force when it is exposed to
the air. The temporary storage should have the volume
large enough for the jet pump to keep sucking liquid until
the next ladling. On the other hand, excess of the volume of
the temporary storage, which retrieves much water besides
the oil while ladling, adversely affects the recovery
performance. in the experiment with the wave of about
l.Osec in period, the best performance was found at the
storage volume normalized by the pumping rate of around
1.Osec, which mostly corresponds to the wave period.
d 0 1 2 3 4 5
Volume of skimmer-head /pump capacity(S)
Fig.7 Oil-storing volume of sMmmer-heads
B. Oillwater rough separator
The only one weak point of the water jet pump is that
recovered oil contains much water. For ship use, the free
water should be separated to save capacity of oil storage
tank. We designed a simple gravity type oil/water rough
separator matched to the handy oil-skimmer and carried out
performance test. Fig.8 shows the testing apparatus.
Table 2 shows test result using bunker-C oil and emulsified
oil. The average oil separation efficiency is 97.2% for
emulsfied oil and 85.5% for bunker-C oil.

Fig.5 Oil recovering test Fig.8 Oillwater rough separator

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Bunker-C oil is less viscous, so it is broken to small
particles which take a long time to rise up. Emulsified oil is later outlet oilwater inlet
viscous, so it does not easily break to Small particles which buffer qlates
rise up in a short time. In oil-recovering work with the handy
oil-skimmer, it is not necessary to hesitate to suck much
water with oil, as oil can be separated easily through a
simple gravity-type oillwater rough separator. Water in
recovered oil takes a role as lubricant in transferring pipe.
Performance of the oillwater rough separator depends on
the time water passing through the apparatus, and the
inside mechanism such as buffer plates is not so important.
Fig.9 shows separated oil, fiowing out from a simple
oiVwater rough separator made of a plastic container
available anywhere. Even for high-viscous oil, the Aa
si container
t
c
separated oil flows out fluently, because high-viscous oil is
mixed with water when passing through the water-jet pump.
Inside mechanism of the oiilwater rough separator is shown Fig.10 Cross-section of the oillwater separator
in Fig.10. Oil1 water mixture is supplied through the
oil/water inlet. Large lumps of high-viscous oil rise up at
once, but small oil particles rise up slowly while water flows Even though the mass of the skimmer-head itself is small, it
upldown through the buffer plates. Quantity of oil outlet is generates very large torque at the operator's end. The
adjusted with a gate to keep water level in the separator. weight of the handy oil-skimmer was slimmed finally to 5 kg,
but it was still heavy for a person to handle it for a long time
without any supporting device. At first, we tried to
Tabll !Test result of oillwater separation compensate the mass of the skimmer-head with some
floats, it was found, however, that the floats did not work as
well as we expected. The float disturbs a quick motion that
the operator tries to take when he chases the floating oil
Oil type before patches. In order to know what kind of supporting device is
suitable for the system, three types of the apparatus shown
in Fig. 11 were made and tested. '"Roller type" was
5.59 0.18 97.0 expected of good performance, but it was not usable unless
height of the roller can be easily adjusted to match
5.68 0.27 95.5 operators' height. "Shoulder belt type" was not suitable,
5.77 0.32 94.8 because distance between center of gravity and position of
Emulsified
6.43 0.13 98.1 operator's shoulder causes torque force on the hands. But
9.75 0.14 98.7 this type is helpful for using on a fiat place like beach.
11.31 0.12 99.1 "Hanging type" consists of a davit and a spring-balancer.
Average 97.2
Bunker-C 2.29 I 0.34 85.5 I Method

A - (100 - A)B
*Oil separation efficiency 11 is defined as 7 = Roller
A
Skimmer
Roller type

Shoulder belt
Shoulder belt
type

w'Center of gravity
Fig.9 Separated oil Davit
Hanging type

c. Skimmer-supporting apparatus
Weight of the skimmer-head at the end of the shaft directly
affects how easily the operator can manipulate the system.
The operator has to support the cantilever at the other end. Fig.11 Skimmer supporting apparatus

1467 -
This type was most usable to be used on ships' deck.
Fig.12 shows an onboard-test of skimmer-supporting
The curvature shown in the figure is logical data of 800
mPa.s oil. Five hundred thousands mPa.s oil can be
I
apparatus of hanging type. The davit was fixed to handrail transferred in a pipe easily with water-lubricant. I
with cramps, and turned freely by a hand. The skimmer was
hanged with a spring-balancer from the top of the davit.
Tension force of the spring-balancer was adjusted on site.

Fig.14 Oil-transferring test

-e.-..
water n low-viscousoil

Fig.12 Onboard test of "Hanging type" 1

U
D. Transfer of recovered oil through pipe b
l 5
I
High-viscous oil recovered with a handy oil-skimmer c 1
should be transferred to a storage tank through pipe. But it '2
is difficult to send recovered oil through a smaii pipe, if I:
viscosity of the oil is over several hundred thousands z
m P a s The merit of the water jet pump is that driving-water I
breaks a mass of high-viscous oil to small particls as shown
O
in Fig.13, and the oil with water-lubricant can be transferred OW 0.20 0 40 0.60 0.80 I W
through a small pipe easily. Viscosity of oil recovered by the
water jet pump is about 60 to 80 thousands mPa.s. but it Velocity in pipe (m/s)
gradually resumes initial viscosity in a few days.
We carried out an experiment to transfer viscous oil
through 20m-long pipe with water-lubricant. Viscosity of oil Fig.15 Friction factor in pipe
used in this test was about 100,000 to 500,000 mPa.s.
Fig.14 shows scene of test. Fig. 15 shows the test result,
the vertical axis is friction factor in a pipe.
E Derivatives of handy oil-skimmer system
At first the target was to develop a handy oil-skimmer
for a large oil recovery vessel, which is called type "B-1R"
oil-skimmer, but additionally two types of smaller
oil-skimmers are developed for another usage as shown in
Fig.16 and Fig.17. The skimmer shown in Fig.16. which is
called type "P-2, is designed to be used on the beach and
the weight is about 3 kg. Another version shown in Fig.17,
which is called type "P-1", is designed to be used on a small
boat and the weight is about 4 kg. Difference among them
is mainly dimensions of the shaft and the skimmer-head.
A mass of oil is broken to oil particles by water. The diameter of P-l and P-2 is 30".

. ..,.,.
. .
. .
"
.

.
...
'
'.,.'
:
,
..
':

I
i

oil particles 1 ' water T..

Fig.13 Mechanism of water lubrication Fig.16 Oil-skimmer for beach use

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Fig.17 Oil-skimmer for a small boat
Oil-recovering capacity, which is calculated from test
results in tank test, is shown in Table 3. in the table, the oil
of viscosity 5,200 mPa.s is bunker-C and other two kinds of
oil are emulsfied oil. The values shown in m3/hr are total
recovered oillwater. The values shown in % are oil content
in total recovered oillwater.
The oil-skimmers are packaged with driving-water
pump, oillwater rough separator and hoses like as shown in
Fig.18. To avoid complication in production, the design of
the three types of oil-skimmer was modified to use common
elements except length later. Fig.19 shows the standard
design of a handy oil-skimmer. The length L is adjusted to
match freeboard of ships.
Driving water pump Oillwater separator
Oil-skimmer 1 I /
Fig.18 Oil-skimmer system on a ship
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IV. Concluding remarks
In this study, a handy oil-skimmer to supplement large
oil recovery vessels has been experimentally investigated.
The followings are the main conclusions.
i) A water jet pump has good performance for recovering
high-viscous oil.
ii) Recovering capacity of a handy oil-skimmer is over 4
m31hrwith 4Mpa driving water pressure.
iii) If using this handy oil-skimmer, one drum of net oil, its'
viscosity 230,000 mPas and under, shall be recovered
in less than 16 minutes.
iv) Friction factor in the pipe does not matter since the water
content lubricates the flow inside the pipe.
v) A simple gravity type oiilwater rough separator is very
useful to separate oil from oilbater mixture.
vi) A method of hanging the oil-skimmer by a davit with a
spring-balancer is very effective.
After 3 years investigation. development of a handy
oil-skimmer system was successfully completed. We are
convinced that the system will contribute to environmental
problem. The developed handy oil-skimmer system will be
soon applied to five governmental ships.
Fig.19 Standard design of a handy oil-skimmer
References
[I]WORLD CATALOG OF OIL SPILL RESPONSE
PRODUCTS, CHAPTER 2 OIL SPILL SKiMMER
121 lsamu FUJITA, Muneo YOSHIE, Masahiro MIZUTANI,
Masayosi SANO, Masayuki FUDO and Masamitsu
TATSUGUCHI "An onboard Vacuum Suction spoilied Oil
Recovery System"
-