AN EXPERIMENT OF ULTRASONIC WAVES ON CLEANING OF EMULSIFIED HEAVY FUEL OIL FOR OIL SPILL RESPONSE

Abstract

A large amount of heavy fuel oil C was spilled out to the sea in the wreck of the Russian tanker “ Nakhodka ” in January, 1997, and serious damage was brought to the coasts which face to the Sea of Japan. Cleaning cost of an oil recovery vessel is very high and polluted beach is recovered by hand wiping without steam spray and detergents that kill life. So the cost reduction and new method of cleaning equipments and beaches is requested.
We experimented with cleaning heavy fuel oil from iron plates with only physical cleaning from ultrasonic power. The experiments were carried out under room temperature without detergents.
We obtained relation between the cleaning time and frequency, and between the time and power density, of ultrasonic waves. Besides, the relation between the cleaning time and the cleaning rate was approximated with theory curve of a cleaning velocity.