Oil droplets dispersion under a deep-water plunging breaker: Experimental measurements and numerical modeling

Abstract

Abstract (1141370) Wave tank experiments were performed to measure the droplets size distribution under the plunging breaking wave. A deep-water plunging breaker of height 20 cm was generated using the dispersive focusing method, and a shadowgraph camera was used to take images of droplets and bubbles of different sizes. For droplets smaller than the 1000 microns, the number-based DSD matched the DS correlation (Delvigne and Sweeney 1988), which gives N(d) ~ d−2.3, but N(d) ~ d−9.7 for diameters larger than 1000 microns. A numerical method was designed to study the oil dispersion under breaking waves by coupling the computational fluid dynamic (CFD) with the Lagrangian particle tracking code (NEMO3D) and population balance model (VDROP). The wave hydrodynamics was reproduced using the Reynolds-averaged Navier Stokes approach within a commercial CFD code ANSYS Fluent. The obtained wave hydrodynamics was then used as inputs for the NEM3D code and VDROP model. The numerical results show reasonable agreement with our experimental observation. The approach adopted to produce the DSD reduces the empiricism of the DS correlation, as the approach uses oil properties and measurable wave properties. The proposed numerical method was ready to be used in other scenarios of oil spills (i.e., oil jets in deep oceans and oil dispersion in riverine systems). It could also be potentially used in large scale forecast and hindcast simulations for oil spill response and research.