CFD-Based Metamodeling of the Propagation Distribution of Styrene Spilled from a Ship

Abstract

The present study aimed to numerically establish a new metamodel for predicting the propagation distribution of styrene, which is one of the hazardous and noxious substances (HNSs) spilled from ships. Three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were conducted for 80 different scenarios to gather large amounts of data on the spatial distribution of the change in concentration over time. We used the commercial code of ANSYS Fluent (V.17.2) to solve the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations, together with the scalar transport equation. Based on the CFD results, we adopted the well-known kriging model to create a metamodel that estimated the propagation velocity and spatial distributions by considering the effect of the current surface velocity, deep current velocity, surface layer depth, and crack position. The results show that the metamodel accurately predicted the changes in the local distribution of styrene over time. This model was also evaluated using the hidden-point test.