Numerical Simulation of the Gravity-Inertial Spreading of Oil Using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

Oil spills at sea are a severe environmental concern. They can occur during the various stages of well-drilling, repair operations or transportation. The spreading of oil occurs due to the pollutant's tendency to flow over itself. Knowledge of its physical properties during the phenomenon, such as velocities and spatial positions, allows the timely adoption of environmental protection measures. This book presents, in a simple and objective way, the development and implementation of purely Lagrangian numerical modelling using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method for the study of the spreading of oil in its first stage (gravity-inertial regime) on a calm sea. The computational code's implementation and validation were carried out through the simulation of classical problems in the scientific literature, i.e., heat diffusion in a homogeneous flat plate, a still volume of water inside an immobile reservoir and a dam failure. From the coupling of the software with a collision detection and response algorithm, numerical results in concordance with the curve adjusted by James Fay (a pioneering scientist in the study of oil spills) for the prediction of oil slick diameters at the end of the gravity-inertial regime were achieved.