A compositional Eulerian approach for modeling oil spills in the sea

We present a Compositional Eulerian model to forecast the evolution of oil spills in the sea. The model allows studying the fate of not only the oil concentration but also of each component (e.g., volatile, non-volatile, water in the oil). Therefore, the problem is formulated as a conservation equation for each component, plus an equation to estimate the age of the oil, which allows us to assess weathering processes (e.g., evaporation, natural dispersion, emulsion) and the associated changes in oil properties. We describe an efficient implementation, using second order numerical schemes for advection and nonlinear diffusion terms, to reduce numerical diffusion. We perform numerical experiments, based on real and synthetic cases, to illustrate and validate the capabilities of our model to forecast the evolution of oil spills and to perform environmental risk analysis in the case of a potential accident

A compositional Eulerian approach for modeling oil spills in the sea

We present a Compositional Eulerian model to forecast the evolution of oil spills in the sea. The model allows studying the fate of not only the oil concentration but also of each component (e.g., volatile, non-volatile, water in the oil). Therefore, the problem is formulated as a conservation equation for each component, plus an equation to estimate the age of the oil, which allows us to assess weathering processes (e.g., evaporation, natural dispersion, emulsion) and the associated changes in oil properties. We describe an efficient implementation, using second order numerical schemes for advection and nonlinear diffusion terms, to reduce numerical diffusion. We perform numerical experiments, based on real and synthetic cases, to illustrate and validate the capabilities of our model to forecast the evolution of oil spills and to perform environmental risk analysis in the case of a potential accident.This work was carried out thanks to the financial support from the Spanish “Ministry of Science and Innovation” under Project PID2019-106337GB-I00 and the National University of Mexico Project PASPA, DGAPA . We also thank Nelson del Castillo, for his support in the elaboration of this article. Comments by two anonymous reviewers have contributed to improving the final version of the paper. Some of the figures proposed in this work include maps from the Google Map website (see, for instance, https://www.google.com/maps).Peer reviewe