The accidental oil spill is one of the most critical disasters in coastal areas and can cause serious damage to the ecosystem and society. Oil spill spreading is a complex process involving the highly nonlinear interaction of two fluids with very different properties. In this study, the Consistent Particle Method (CPM) is enhanced by incorporating the continuum surface force model and applied to simulate oil spill spreading. Firstly, based on a circular ring case, the advantage of CPM in computing the curvature of an interface (key in simulating the interfacial tension force) is demonstrated, and the influence of the smoothing length in curvature calculation is tested as well. Secondly, the capability of the CPM model in capturing the interfacial tension force is validated by the case of two-dimensional droplet deformation. Finally, the benchmark examples, namely, oil slick spreading in a reservoir and oil spill from a damaged tank, are studied by the enhanced CPM model. The influence of adding the surface tension model in the simulation is examined. The morphological and kinematic properties of the oil spill process are discussed.
The accidental oil spill is concerning in coastal management and ocean protection because such an event can cause serious water pollution and ecosystem damage. To harness oil spills and hence minimize the damaging effects, a reliable prediction of the speed and extent of oil spill spreading is of great significance. With the development of computer hardware and numerical algorithms, numerical modeling has become a promising tool in predicting the oil spill feature; yet, some challenges still exist due to density/viscosity discontinuities and large deformations of the water-oil interface.
In the last two decades, the so-called particle methods have been gaining significant developments and have been demonstrated to handle the large deformation of fluid interface well (Gotoh et al., 2021; Luo et al., 2021; Vacondio et al., 2020; Zhang, Zhu,Wu, and Hu, 2022). Based on the strategy of solving fluid pressure, particle methods can be grouped into weakly-compressible and projection-based methods. The most commonly used weakly-compressible method is the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) (Bui and Nguyen, 2021; Guo et al., 2022; Kazemi and Luo, 2022; Lyu et al., 2022; Vacondio et al., 2020; Zhang, Zhu, Yu, et al., 2022). The projection-based methods include the Moving Particle Semi-implicit (MPS) method (Khayyer et al., 2019; Wen et al., 2022; Zhang, Zha, et al., 2022), Incompressible SPH (Chow et al., 2022), and Consistent Particle Method (CPM) (Koh et al., 2012; Luo et al., 2019).
