Accidental oil spill is one of the most critical disasters in coastal areas and can cause serious damages to the ecosystem and the economy. The oil spill diffusion 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 (CSF) model and applied to simulate the oil spill process. Firstly, the advantage of CPM in computing the curvature of an interface, which is key in simulating the interfacial tension force, is demonstrated by a circular ring case. Secondly, the capability of the CPM model in capturing the interfacial tension force is validated by a two-dimensional droplet deformation. Finally, the benchmark example of oil slick spreading from the top corner of a reservoir is simulated 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 concerned in coastal management and ocean protection because such an event, once happened, can cause serious water pollution, ecosystem damage and economic loss. To harness oil spill and hence minimize its damaging effects, a reliable prediction of the speed and extent of oil spill is of great significance. As the development of computer hardware and numerical algorithms, the numerical modelling has become a promising tool in predicting the oil spill feature, yet, some challenges still exist due to the density/viscosity discontinuities and the large deformations of the water-oil interface.
In the last two decades, the so-called particle methods have been getting significant developments and have been demonstrated to handle the large deformation of fluid interface naturally well (Ye et al. 2019, Gotoh et al. 2021, Luo et al. 2021, Vacondio et al. 2021). Based on the strategy of solving fluid pressure, particle methods can be grouped into the weakly-compressible particle methods (e.g., Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) (Vacondio et al. 2021) and Finite Particle Method (Zhang et al. 2020)) and the projection-based methods (e.g., Moving Particle Semi-implicit (MPS) (Khayyer et al. 2019), Incompressible SPH (Zheng et al. 2017) and Consistent Particle Method (CPM) (Koh et al. 2012, Luo et al. 2019).
