EO Dashboard Hackathon

Cosmic Pulsar | Ship Traffic and the Impact on Air Quality

Ship Traffic and the Impact on Air Quality

The COVID-19 pandemic strongly affected global logistics and supply chains, and hence shipping activity. This challenge asks you to target the characterization of dynamic shipping activities as seen from space.

PRODUCTION OF ALTERNATIVE FUELS FROM MUCILAGE FOR SHIPS

Summary

While the waste we release to nature has decreased significantly during this COVID-19 period, it has not stopped completely. stoping this completely is up to us. In this project, we aimed to reduce the waste released to nature.One of the reasons why the damage to nature continues during the pandemic is shipping. Although shipping decreased due to the slowdown in trade due to the pandemic, the demand for vaccines occurred as the pandemic continued, and as a result, shipping increased and harmful gas emissions increased again. In our project we thought if we can use a biological waste called "mucilage" which occurs during pandemic to produce an alternative fuel.

How I Addressed This Challenge

Increase of Ship Traffic affects natural habitat of marines in a bad way. Due to ships and other marine vessels, harmful gases (such as NO2 and CO2) are released into the air. So, air quality is getting worse and worse. As an effect of this, climate change occurs. This climate change warms up seas and oceans as a result. Warmer waters become too good for algae which results in algae overload. Algae overload pollutes seas as marine mucilage. So, harmful gases which is produced by ships and other marine vessels pollute nature in a lot of ways. In the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic, ship traffic decreased due to drop in demand. As a result, air pollution is reduced. After the production of COVID-19 vaccines, demand increased. Thus air pollution increased. To make air quality and nature better, there had to be a solution that reduces the production of harmful gases in the air. So, our solution is to use marine mucilage to produce alternative fuel that doesn't produce harmful gases. The best way to make that happen is pyrolysis process which is a thermal decomposition. The primary products of the pyrolysis process are char, bio oil and fuel gas. All of these end products are useful materials that can be used in a lot of ways.

How I Developed This Project

All around the world humans are getting irresponsible for environment more and more. Also in Turkey, the country where our team members from, there is an important problem called air pollution. In Turkey, if we look a photo of different cities you can see the difference of air pollution between cities. When we looked at challanges we consider the air pollution in our country and said we need to stop this. So we chose the air quality challange. According to air pollution in Turkey we thought we can transform the damage we did to the natural environment into benefits for nature and our life. Also when this idea comes out we chose a harmful thing which formed as a result of human irresponsibilities.

How I Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We investigated the distribution of SO2 (sulfur dioxide), NO2 (nitrogen dioxide) and CO2 (carbon dioxide) gases in the world and compared the rates of these gases in the world atmosphere in the past with current data. We also used the sources in the videos you posted. We guided our research by looking at the data of the satellite device called "Sentinel-5P".

Project Demo

https://1drv.ms/p/s!Apk8KaYcZ7IlmAdKX-39DXuRSqfS?e=AcKqrI

Earth Observing Dashboard Integration

Data can be obtained by making a sensor that measures how much mucilage is converted into energy and adding it to the pyrolysis unit. The data obtained as a result of this is transmitted directly to the "EO Dashboard" and an energy map can be created with this data.