Abstract
Spilled oil in inland waterways can aggregate with mineral and organic particles to form oil-particle aggregates (OPAs). OPAs can be transported in suspension or deposited to the bed. Modeling the fate and transport of OPAs can provide useful information for making mitigation decisions. A novel open-source tool, FluOil, is developed to predict where OPAs may deposit and when they arrive in affected river/lake reaches by implementing the random walk particle tracking algorithm to represent the advection, diffusion, deposition, and resuspension of OPAs. The usability of FluOil is demonstrated with the 2010 Kalamazoo River oil spill case study. An unsteady hydrodynamic model simulates the river hydraulics and provides hydraulic data for use in FluOil. Settling velocity and critical shear stress for resuspension are the most important OPA properties concerning the transport and deposition of OPAs. Settling velocity determines the vertical distribution of OPAs and, thus, the travel speed, whereas critical shear stress determines where and when OPAs are deposited and resuspended.
Highlights
Oil spills require costly cleanups immediately after the spill and potentially cause tremendous environmental and ecological threats in the contaminated water bodies (Barron et al, 2020)
According to the general performance evaluation criteria proposed by Moriasi et al (2007), a hydrologic model is in the “very good” category if Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) is in the range from 0.75 to 1, percent bias (PBIAS) (%) is ≤ ±10, and RSR is in the range from 0 to 0.5
Assuming that the fraction of spilled oil not recovered by conventional techniques was lost to submergence beneath the water surface, the bitumen that submerged in the Kalamazoo River was greater than 300,000 liters, which is around 10 percent of the total volume of spilled oil (Fitzpatrick et al, 2015a)
Summary
Oil spills require costly cleanups immediately after the spill and potentially cause tremendous environmental and ecological threats in the contaminated water bodies (Barron et al, 2020). With the presence of suspended particles in the water column, collisions between oil droplets and particles may result in OPAs, not all of the collisions generate stable OPAs. The formed OPAs can have a variety of properties including size, density, settling velocity, and critical bed shear stress for resuspension, which are important for understanding, simulating, and predicting the fate and transport of OPAs in the aquatic environment. Modeling the fate and transport of OPAs is critical for oil spill response or risk assessment (Amir-Heidari et al, 2019) These models usually combine a transport module for OPAs with hydrodynamic modeling to simulate where the OPAs transport and deposit. Zhu et al (2018) developed a three-dimensional hydrodynamic model coupled with a Lagrangian particle tracking model to study the transport of OPAs in Morrow Lake, Michigan, USA, after the 2010 Kalamazoo River oil spill. The graphics illustrating the travel time, potential areas to be affected, and locations where heavy deposition of OPAs may result can be generated automatically, and results can be geo-referenced to project in the Google Earth program (Google Keyhole, Inc., 2021)
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