ABSTRACT

This paper presents a comparison of the existing research about the deep sea mining industry, including the deep sea mining necessity, the mineral transport process, the simulation method (numerical and experimental) and the required evaluation parameters. The objective of this paper is to find a research direction to design a green transport plan for a deep sea mining system. The research combines the macroscopic research of the dynamic response simulation of the ship-pipe-miner system together with the microscopic research of the solid-liquid two-phase flow propagation. The coupling work of the macroscopic research and microscopic research follows the fluid-structure interaction principle. An optimal transport plan can be determined depending on the multi-criteria evaluation system. Finally, a control system of the deep sea mining system links the optimization results with the realistic production plans. The research conducted in this paper is meaningful for the pre-design and evaluation of a deep sea mining project.

INTRODUCTION

In the year 1965 deep sea mining (DSM) research was first reported with the publication of J. L. Mero's The Mineral Resources of the Sea (Chung, 2005). DSM is an integrated ship-pipe-miner system, which is responsible for the extraction of mineral resources from the ocean floor to the ocean surface. DSM working areas often locate at the relative active places of the earth, such as some extinct hydrothermal vents (Reed, Breier and Jiang, 2015). The mining depth of the DSM industry ranges from 800 m to 6000 m (Chung, 1996). Although DSM industry is easily influenced by the worldwide economy and mineral prices (Hoagland, Beaulieu and Tivey, 2010), its research and development has not been completely interrupted yet. As the resources on-land decrease significantly, more countries would like to invest more efforts and researches for the DSM future development. The ocean environment has abundant storages of different resources, which are quite scarce on-land, see Table 1.

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