Replacing a ship's cleaning regime with a robot could save its owner 4,000 tonnes of oil a year, and around $800,000 in fuel bills
suffer from fouling: the build-up below the waterline of shellfish, seaweeds and other organisms. This causes drag, which slows the affected craft and increases its fuel consumption. Regular hull cleaning thus makes a considerable difference to the profitability of shipping.
At the moment, cleaning at sea is done by teams of divers. In recent years, robots have sometimes been added to underwater cleaning crews, and have proved effective. Jotun, a Norwegian coatings company, and Semcon, a Swedish engineering firm, propose, however, to go one step further. They want to replace the divers completely with a machine. That machine, moreover, would not merely defoul a ship’s hull, but stop it fouling up in the first place.
The idea is to keep the hull permanently clean, by regularly removing from it the layers of slime-producing bacteria that are the first stage of the fouling process. Bacterial biofilms, as these layers are known technically, are used as anchorages by the larvae of so-called “hard growth” organisms, such as barnacles and molluscs, and by the spores of trailing seaweeds.
A bonus of all this effort is that an unfouled ship has little risk of carrying unwanted passengers in the form of alien animal species that might make a nuisance of themselves if they were to become established far from home. Asian paddle crabs, North Pacific seastars, Asian green mussels and European fan worms are four common hull-fouling animals that can turn into pests if introduced into the wrong settings.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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