THEORETICAL FOUNDATION FOR PREDICTING DISPERSION EFFECTIVENESS DUE TO WAVES

Abstract

ABSTRACT The studies of dispersion of oil in wave tanks have reached their maturity in terms of analytical techniques for measuring and quantifying dispersion. However, there does not seem to be a theoretical framework for predicting or even interpreting the results based on the physics of the problem. One of the reasons is that the oil breakup studies were based on chemical reactors where the energy input is constant with time whereas the energy input to droplets varies with time under waves. For this reason, we present a holistic approach that accounts for the duration over which the oil is subjected to various intensities along with a droplet kinetics model that uses a variable energy dissipation rate function. A salient advantage of the droplet model is that it accounts for the effects of scale of problem, because it has been observed that large systems produce smaller droplets than smaller systems with the same average kinetic energy dissipation rate. We illustrate the usage of the model using simulated wave data.