Abstract
Oil spills produced by accidents from oil tankers and blowouts of oil and gas from offshore platforms cause tremendous damage to the environment as well as to marine and human life. To prevent oil and gas that are accidentally released from deep water from spreading and causing further damage to the environment over time, early detection and monitoring systems can be deployed to the area where underwater releases of the oil and gas first occurred. Monitoring systems can provide a rapid inspection of the area by detecting chemical substances and collecting oceanographic data necessary for enhancing the accuracy of simulation of behavior of oil and gas. An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) called the spilled oil and gas tracking autonomous buoy system (SOTAB-I) has been developed to perform on-site measurements of oceanographic data as well as dissolved chemical substances using underwater mass spectrometry. In this chapter, the outlines of SOTAB-I and a description of its hardware and software are presented. The operating modes and guidance and control of the robot are detailed. The experimental results obtained during the early deployments of SOTAB-I in the shallow water of the Gulf of Mexico in the USA demonstrated the ability of SOTAB-I to collect substances’ dissolutions in seawater such as hydrocarbons. Deepwater experiments were conducted in Toyama Bay in Japan and enabled demonstration of the ability of SOTAB-I to establish the vertical water column distribution of oceanographic data, such as temperature, salinity, and density. In addition, a high-resolution profile of water currents was obtainable.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
An E, Dhanak MR, Shay LK, Smith S, Leer JV (2001) Coastal oceanography using a small AUV. J Atmos Ocean Technol 18:215–234
Azuma A, Nasu, KI (1977) The flight dynamics of an ocean space surveying vehicle. Institute of Space and Science, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan. Report No. 547, Vol. 42, No. 2, pp 41–90
Bell RJ (2009) Development and deployment of an underwater mass spectrometer for quantitative measurements of dissolved gases. Ph.D. thesis, University of South Florida,St. Petersburg, Florida
Bell RJ et al (2007) Calibration of an in situ membrane inlet mass spectrometer for measurements of dissolved gases and volatile organics in seawater environ. Sci Technol 41:8123–8128
Bell RJ et al (2011) In situ determination of total dissolved inorganic carbon by underwater membrane introduction mass spectrometry. Limnol Oceanogr Methods 9:164–175. doi:10.4319/lom.2011.9.164
Chiba H et al (2015) The characteristics of the flow pattern in Toyama Bay by onboard ADCP observations -Anticlockwise eddy at the inner part of Toyama Bay in summer
Choyekh M et al (2014) Vertical water column survey in the gulf of mexico using autonomous underwater vehicle SOTAB-I. Mar Technol Soc J: Vol. 49, No. 3, 88–101
Eriksen CC et al (2001) Seaglider: a long-range autonomous underwater vehicle for oceanographic research. IEEE J Ocean Eng 26(4):424
Fofonoff N, Millard R (1983) Algorithms for computation of fundamental properties of seawater. UNESCO Tech Pap Mar Sci 44:1–53
Handa YP (1990) Effect of hydrostatic pressure and salinity on the stability of gas hydrates. J Phys Chem 94:2652–2657
Harvey J et al (2012) AUVs for ecological studies of marine plankton communities. Sea Technol 53(9):51
Hess JL, Smith AMO (1964) Calculation of non-lifting potential flow about three dimensional bodies. J Ship Res 8(2):22–44
Jakuba MV et al (2011) Toward automatic classification of chemical sensor data from autonomous underwater vehicles, intelligent robots and systems. In: IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems, pp 4722–4727
Johansen Ø et al (2003) Deep spill–field study of a simulated oil and gas blowout in deep water. Spill Sci Technol Bull 8(5–6):433–443
Joye SB et al (2011) Magnitude and oxidation potential of hydrocarbon gases released from the BP oil well blowout. Nat Geosci 4:160–164
Kawahara S et al (2014) Numerical investigation on behavior of methane gas/hydrate seeping out from deep sea floor. In: The 24th ocean engineering symposium, OES24-050.
Kessler JD et al (2011) A persistent oxygen anomaly reveals the fate of spilled methane in the deep gulf of Mexico. Science 21 331(6015):312–315
Maxino TC, Koopman PJ (2009) The effectiveness of checksums for embedded control networks. IEEE Trans Dependable Secure Comput 6(1), pp 59–72
Medagoda L, Williams BS, Pizarro O, Jakuba VM (2011) Water column current profile aided localization combined with view-based SLAM for autonomous underwater vehicle navigation. In: IEEE International conference on robotics and automation, pp 3048–3055
Mitchell R et al (1999) Estimates of total hydrocarbon seepage into the Gulf of Mexico based on satellite remote sensing images. EOS Suppl 80:OS242
Roemmich D et al (2009) The argo program observing the global ocean with profiling floats. Oceanography 22(2):34–43. doi:10.5670/oceanog.2009.36
Servio P, Englezons P (2002) Measurement of dissolved methane in water in equilibrium with its hydrate. J Chem Eng Data 47:87–90
Shaffer G et al (2009) Long-term ocean oxygen depletion in response to carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. Nat Geosci 2:p105–p109
Short RT et al (2006) Detection and quantification of chemical plumes using a portable underwater membrane introduction mass spectrometer. Trends Anal Chem 25(7):637–646
Solomon EA et al (2009) Considerable methane fluxes to the atmosphere from hydrocarbon seeps in the Gulf of Mexico. Nat Geosci 2:p561–p565
Stanway MJ (2010) Water profile navigation with an Acoustic Doppler current profiler. OCEANS 2010, Sydney. doi:10.1109/OCEANSSYD.2010.5603647
Vickery K (1998) Acoustic positioning systems. A practical overview of current systems. In: Proceedings of the 1998 workshop on autonomous underwater vehicles. Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA, pp 5–17
Vogel M et al (2001) Real-time deepwater current profiling system. Proc. OCEANS 2001 (MTS/IEEE) 1:269–274
Wenner PG et al (2004) Environmental chemical mapping using an underwater mass spectrometer. TrAC Trends Anal Chem 23:288–295. doi:10.1016/S0165-9936(04)00404-2
Yang DH, Xu WY (2007) Effects of salinity on methane gas hydrate system. Sci China Ser D Earth Sci 50(11):1733–1745, Springer
Zhang Y, Willcox JS (1997) Current velocity mapping using an AUV borne acoustic Doppler current profiler. In: Proceeding of the 10th International symposium on unmanned untethered submersible technology, Durham, pp 31–40
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer Japan
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Choyekh, M. et al. (2017). Development and Operation of Underwater Robot for Autonomous Tracking and Monitoring of Subsea Plumes After Oil Spill and Gas Leak from Seabed and Analyses of Measured Data. In: Kato, N. (eds) Applications to Marine Disaster Prevention. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55991-7_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55991-7_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Tokyo
Print ISBN: 978-4-431-55989-4
Online ISBN: 978-4-431-55991-7
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)