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Modeling oil dispersion under breaking waves. Part I: Wave hydrodynamics

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Abstract

The dispersion (transport and breakup) of oil droplets under breaking waves is essential for evaluating the impact of oil spills on the environment, and for designing countermeasures. In this part of the work (Part I), the hydrodynamics of a wave breaker in a 1.0 m deep tank obtained experimentally by Rapp and Melville (Philos Trans R Soc Lond A Math Phys Eng Sci 331(1622):735–800, 1990) using the dispersive focusing method was investigated numerically using Reynold-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) within the CFD code ANSYS Fluent. The renormalization group (RNG) k–ε turbulence closure model was adopted to simulate wave turbulence, and the transient water–air interface was captured using volume of fluid (VOF) method. The simulated surface excursion and velocity fields matched closely the experimental observations during wave breaking. The energy dissipation of the wave crest showed good agreement with recent laboratory work and numerical simulations through evaluating the breaking parameter. The RANS approach was able to reproduce the turbulent kinetic energy field engendered by the breakers and simulated the residual turbulence within about two wave periods after the passage of the wave train. The VOF scheme Compressive provided a better agreement with the observation than the Geo-reconstruct scheme. The approach herein suggests that RANS method coupled with VOF in ANSYS Fluent is capable of capturing the major hydrodynamic forces and turbulence, and thus could be used to predict environmental processes within the breaking waves such as oil droplet formation and transport.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a contract with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Center for Offshore Oil and Gas Exploration Research, and through a grant from the Multi-Partner Research Initiative under Grant Number MECTS-#3939073-v1-OFSCP. However, no official endorsement should be implied by these entities. This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant Number TG-BCS190002. Specifically, we used the Bridges computer cluster, which is an NSF-funded system at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Natural Resources, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, USA

    Fangda Cui, Cosan Daskiran & Michel C. Boufadel

  2. Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Dartmouth, NS, Canada

    Thomas King, Brian Robinson & Kenneth Lee

  3. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Joseph Katz

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  1. Fangda Cui
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Correspondence to Michel C. Boufadel.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Table 3 and Fig. 16.

Table 3 Wavenumber and frequency of the wave packet with a constant wave amplitude an = 0.34 cm
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Fig. 16
figure 16

Time series of the horizontal velocity (left panel) and vertical velocity (right panel) at x = 0.0 m (inlet boundary) and z = 0.6 m (water level in the absence of waves). The vertical velocity is 90o degree out of phase with the horizontal velocity, so, for example, the vertical velocity is zero when the horizontal velocity is maximum

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Cui, F., Daskiran, C., King, T. et al. Modeling oil dispersion under breaking waves. Part I: Wave hydrodynamics. Environ Fluid Mech 20, 1527–1551 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10652-020-09753-7

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