A Biodegradable Surface Velocity Program Surface Drifters (SVB-BIO)
Abstract
The we propose to fabricate 24 drifter systems which total of 120 Surface Velocity Program (SVP) type drifters drogued at a depth of 15 m with biodegradable and/or sustainably produced materials. The goal of this effort is to reduce the environmental impact associated with drifter deployments, by drastically reducing the amount of petroleum-based plastic of the drifters The design of these new drifters will be identical to the one developed by the Lagrangian Drifter Laboratory (LDL), under the direction Dr. Peter Niiler and Dr. Luca Centurioni at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) and Mr. Lancelot Braasch. The LDL SVP drifter design has been extensively tested in the field, with an excess of 2,000 drifters produced and deployed worldwide in the past five years to maintain the Global Drifter Program Array and in support of several ONR experiments. The ecological friendly drifters fabricated with this effort will be deployed in support of several ONR Departmental Research Initiatives such as CALYPSO, NISKINe and MISO-BoB. The drifters will be fabricated at the LDL. The materials selected to be used in the SVP-BIO typically cost anywhere from 50% to 400% more than their petroleum-based equivalent found on the standard SVP and SVP-B drifters, but due to the trace amounts used per platform and total volume per year, these price increases only raise the drifter~s bill of materials by roughly 20% overall. We deem that the higher fabrication cost is justified in light of the increasing sensitivity of the environmental impact associated with large-scale, global field-work, where often the high cost of ship-time does not allow the recovery of instrumentation
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jun 13, 2019
- Source ID
- N000141912380
Entities
People
- Luca Centurioni
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of California, San Diego