Abstract
Spilled oil at sea spreads very rapidly and results in a serious impact on coastal activities. Thus oil spreading should be prevented at earlier stage of oil accidents. In this paper, a new concept of an oil boom, called folding type is introduced. The model is a self-inflatable type and a rhombus shape in its cross section. At each corner, springs are equipped for the oil fence to be self-inflatable at an installation stage. The oil fence has advantages in handling and storage sides compared to conventional oil-fences. The oil fence is believed to keep a stable condition at the sea state of up to 4 or 5 and the magnitude of metacenter height of the oil fence is over 2 m.
In this work, a physical experiment is carried out in a two dimensional wave tank to check the dynamic behaviour of the oil fence for incident waves. The natural frequency of the model is obtained through the experiments. The amplitude ratio between wave and oil fence model is approximately 1.0 and the phase lag between them is nearly 11°. From this preliminary study, it is found that the static and dynamic stabilities of the model are acceptable for practical application.
