Implementat ion in Mat Lab
The flow model was implemented in Matlab. A single
simulation run used an Ocean Cleanup Array position,
orientation, and length as a fixed four parameter Array
configuration. The initial plastic distribution was mostly
released from the coast. For each Array configuration the
debris flow for every two months of the 20 years of total
simulation time was calculated. Debris that crossed the
Array line was removed, reducing the total amount of debris.
The overall efficiency of a given cleaning Array configuration
was computed as the difference between the
final (relative) amount of plastic after 20 years of simulation
time and the initial concentration.
With an estimate of 1 minute per simulation run approximately
330 days for the entire search process would be
needed. A parallelized computation was therefore implemented
with the support of the Computer Science
Faculty of the Freie Universitat Berlin. About 50 Linux
machines were utilized during night times in order to execute
distinct parts of the total global computation. In the
end, a final script verified that all data was analyzed and
extracted the best configurations.