QUANTITATIVE-ANALYSIS OF SHORE-LINE PROTECTION BY BOOM ARRANGEMENTS

The objective of this paper is to quantitatively analyze the arrangeme nt of booms to improve their effectiveness in protecting natural resou rces. The boom arrangements tested were parallel booms placed at angle s of 60 degrees, 90 degrees and 120 degrees to the shore-line. It was found that the angle between the shoreline and the parallel booms was effective in the range of 45 degrees and 75 degrees for all velocities . The arrangement that was found to be particularly effective was prin cipally a set of three parallel booms placed at an angle of 60 degrees to the shore-line with cylinders placed along the center-line. The op en channel experiment was carried out for four different bow velocitie s, ranging from 0.2 to 0.7 knot. For each speed the position of the pa rallel booms and the size of the cylinders were changed. Cylinder size s varied from 4.5 to 7.5 cm. A volume analysis was performed to determ ine the volume of oil contained. The variation of the length scales fo r the position of the parallel booms and the size of the cylinders wer e used to determine the optimum position for the parallel booms and th e optimum cylinder diameter for each velocity. A relationship of effec tiveness vs U-2/gR was found which displayed a maximum. This relations hip was tested experimentally with random parameters, and verified. Wi th a particular velocity U, the graph may be used to find the optimum radius R for the cylinders to be used. The maximum in the relationship can be explained as follows: for cylinders with smaller diameters the effectiveness increases with increase in diameter because of the incr eased contribution of the centrifugal forces. A maximum is reached bec ause of the physical relationship between the cylinder diameter and th e channel width.