Experimental study on ship fouling cleaning by ultrasonic-enhanced submerged cavitation jet: A preliminary study

Abstract

Ship fouling is one of the essential factors that affect the economic benefits of the operational ships and the marine ecological environment. This will produce adverse effects such as increased energy consumption, increased carbon emissions, biological invasion, and hull damage. In this paper, a novel ultrasonic-enhanced submerged cavitation jet ship fouling cleaning method is proposed. The objective of this paper is to verify the feasibility of this method. A submerged cavitation jet experimental set-up was built. A mass loss method was used to evaluate the experimental results. The experimental results showed that the mass loss of samples increases greatly when the submerged cavitation jet combined with ultrasonic. This is preliminarily proved that the method of ultrasonic-enhanced submerged cavitation jet for cleaning the ship fouling is feasible. Under the pump pressures of 10 MPa and 20 MPa, the maximum mass loss of the samples were increased by 12.9% and 9.5%, respectively.