Abstract
A mathematical model of the evolution of marine oil spills with taking into account the processes of spreading and weathering, has been implemented as a software package called SPILLMOD. In doing so, a new Eulerian-Lagrangian method for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has been developed in the context of solving shallow-water-type equations with the capability to handle the situation where advancing/vanishing layer of the light fluid (oil) only partially covers the heavy (water) in a domain with an arbitrary configuration of the coastline shape. When calculating the evaporation of high-viscosity oil types, the effect of reduction the evaporation rate due to molecular diffusion of lighter oil fractions within the oil layer is taken into account. Simulation of the natural dispersion of oil layer is carried out considering multiple factors, such as: sea surface conditions, experimental data on oil film crushing in the wave mixing layer, turbulent diffusion in the upper layer, as well as changes of physical and chemical properties of oil over time. An additional module in the model is designed to estimate domain boundaries of possible spill detection for different sources of uncertainties during oil spill modeling. Modeling examples of application in realistic configuration of port-water areas for an actually occurred emergency situation of oil spill demonstrate the declared qualities of the model as a tool for supporting emergency response operations.
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