Oil spill accident is extremely harmful to the coastal and marine ecology as well as to the humankind. The simulation and prediction of the transport and the fading away of spilled oil are among the important issues in the oil spill contingency plans. This paper describes a new simulation technique for advection-diffusion phenomena over the sea surface using the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), capable of predicting oil dispersion from tankers. The lattice Boltzmann method was developed from the lattice gas cellular automata of Frisch, Hasslacher, and others. This method has also been applied to demonstrate various engineering phenomena whose most promising application fields include flow simulation of viscous fluid, advection-diffusion system, acoustics, and so on. This paper used the LBM to solve the pollutant transport problem within the framework of the ocean environment. The sea space is represented by the lattices, where each lattice has the information on oil transportation. Since dispersed oils (i.e., oil droplets) at sea are transported by convection due to waves, buoyancy, and turbulent diffusion, the conservation of mass and many physical oil transport rules were used in the prediction model. The proposed model using the LBM is used to simulate a simple pollution event The obtained results indicate that the present method is useful for the investigation of oil spread phenomena in the ocean environment.
Because oil spill accidents happened very often in the last decades, the related tasks, such as oil spill monitoring, prediction, and management became very important issues. Marine ecology will be impacted by the oil spill incident. Oil slick may be mixed with sea water and sink toward sea bottom in the water column. The ecological environment of the sea bottom may be affected by the sunken oil. The coast will be polluted and hard to clean if oil slick floats to the land.
