Chapter 9 - Evaporation Modeling

Abstract

This chapter discusses evaporation. Evaporation is a vital process for most oil spills. The oil evaporation is not strictly air-boundary-layer regulated. Wind velocity, turbulence level, area, thickness, and scale size are not an important issue in evaporation. Time and temperature play an important role in evaporation. Oil spill evaporation shows that the air-boundary-layer models result in erroneous predictions. It has certain limitations in evaporation. Firstly, air-boundary-layer models cannot accurately deal with long-term evaporation. Secondly, the results of wind factor are unrealistic and finally, both air-boundary-layer and the wind factor have not been adjusted for the different curvature for diesel-like evaporation. The most accurate predictions are carried out using the empirical equations. Later, this chapter deals with the equation of evaporation models. The primary equations used in spill models are evaporation equations because evaporation is usually the most significant change that happens in oil's composition. This chapter also explores the complexities of the diffusion-regulated model which is thickness of the oil, the bottle effect, and skinning.