Dispersion modeling of underwater oil released from buried subsea pipeline considering current and wave

Abstract

Marine oil release accident may pose a serve threat to marine environment. Modeling of underwater oil dispersion is helpful for risk assessment and emergency response of marine oil spill accident. This paper presents a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model to describe the dispersion behavior of oil released from buried subsea oil pipeline leak considering current and wave. The numerical model is validated by repeating the small-scale experiments. A comprehensive simulation of underwater oil dispersion from seafloor soil to sea surface under the combined action of wave and current is carried out. Effects of oil density, oil release rate, soil porosity, current speed on underwater oil dispersion are analyzed. Besides, this study considers underwater oil dispersion from multiple leak points on the pipeline, and a regression model for rapidly predicting oil dispersion is developed by numerical fitting. The uniqueness of this study is that it models underwater oil dispersion considering the seafloor soil and the combined action of current and wave. The presence of seafloor soil has a significant effect on oil migration shape and trajectory, and the variation of soil porosity has little effect on the dispersion distance of crude oil plume. Essentially, this study can be useful for the safety-related applications in marine oil spill accidents.