Detection of oil-water interfaces in sunken oil tankers

A nondestructive method of measuring in situ the oil-water interface in a sunken oil barge is described. The method makes use of the different acoustic absorption properties of water and Bunker oil to detect the oil-water interface and can be implemented using a standard 200-kHz echo sounder. An electrically driven bottom-crawling remotely controlled vehicle used to carry out field tests on a sunken oil barge is described, and samples of the sounder records obtained are presented. Results indicate the method is feasible for tanks of simple geometry that have distinct layers of liquids with sufficiently different acoustic absorption properties.