Design and prototype development of portable trash collector boat for small stream application

Abstract

Commercially available trash collector boats are often designed in large size to cater to the high trash loading for surface water cleaning purpose. On the other hand, for small streams and drainage, the manual cleaning method is often used. This situation is undesirable since it can lead to health problem and diseases to the operator due to the number of impurities present in the water. This paper highlights a proposed design of a trash collecting boat for cleaning purposes in small area applications such as lakes, small streams and drainage. The trash collector boat is designed to be a small and automated boat capable of collecting floating solids off the water surface and store them temporarily. The trash will be manually collected at the end of the operation. The design methodology has been accomplished using engineering design method to propose a suitable design of portable trash collector boat based on commercially available design. With the aid of Autodesk Inventor 2009, a 3D representation of the trash collector boat was generated to visualize all the details regarding the trash collector boat. System fabrication will be conducted using appropriate material to ensure the efficiency of trash collector boat. Testing and analysis were conducted to evaluate the system performance, monitoring unit performance and loading capacity of the portable trash collector boat. The results found that the collector boat is capable of handling a maximum trash load of 6 kg in a single operation.