Where does plastic in the ocean come from?

Where does plastic in the ocean come from?: Using the end location to find the likelihood of a possible start location of plastic particles in the ocean

Goudsmit, L. (TU Delft Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Verlaan, M. (mentor)
Vuik, C. (graduation committee)
van Elderen, E.M. (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Applied Mathematics

2020-07-23

In the ocean resides a large amount of plastic. This has severe environmental consequences for the oceans. To be able to clean up all this plastic the location of the plastic is needed. A lot of times plastic is cleaned up at the source, but to clean up here this location needs to be known. However, what if the start location is not known and only the end location is known. This thesis looks at the following research question: Can the method of particle filtering be used to find the start location of a plastic particle of which the end location is known?. The method of particle filtering compares the end locations of the released particles and the end location of the end particle. (The end particle is the particle of which the end location is known and we want to know the start location.) The method calculates weights on the basis of this comparison for each of the released particles. Then the weights are used to calculate a probability density function that gives the likelihood of possible start locations being the right start location of the end particle. The method is applied to the MSC Zoe case, which is a container accident, and a simplification of this case. The MSC Zoe lost in this accident hundreds of containers above the Wadden Islands in the Netherlands, in these containers were bags of plastic particles. A lot of these particles washed ashore on the Wadden Islands. However, it is not known exactly where all the containers fell overboard. So the start location of the plastic particles that washed ashore is not known. The method of particle filtering applied to the simplification showed that it can indeed be used to find the likelihood of possible start locations. However, it also showed that for some values of the variables it was possible to get multiple peaks with weights that are zero in between. This is not a desired outcome for a probability density function (pdf). So a kernel estimation is used to smooth out the pdf's. It uses the weights calculated in the method of particle filtering to estimate the pdf. This gives results that also in this way the likelihood of possible start locations can be found and now without multiple peaks. The kernel estimation was also applied to the MSC Zoe case and the results were calculated for multiple end particles. The locations that came out of this were very close to a few of the possible main locations were containers fell overboard. These possible main locations came from the international investigation into the MSC Zoe accident. A simplification of this research is that the start location is found for one specific plastic particle. For future research it could be interesting to look if the method can be adapted to find the start location of concentrations of plastic particles.

Particle Filtering
Plastic Particles
MSC Zoe
Random Walk Model
Stochastic Differential Equations
Start Location
Kernel Density Estimation

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Student theses

bachelor thesis

© 2020 L. Goudsmit