Abstract

This study investigates experimentally the drift velocity of an elliptical surface film advected by deep-water waves. Thin polyethylene sheets were used to simulate the inextensible surface film. The drift velocities were obtained by recording and analyzing a sequence of images captured using a video camera. The results show that the drift velocity increases with the longitudinal length of the polyethylene sheet until approximately 0.8 times the wavelength. Beyond that, further increment would not result in substantial increase in the drift velocity. The effect due to the normalized transverse width is found to be significant within a particular range. At large wave steepness, the drift velocity appears to be limited by the Stokes drift. A set of best-fit empirical equations based on the sigmoidal function is introduced for oil spill trajectory prediction.

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