Author(s): Hideaki Noguchi; Kesayoshi Hadano; Muneo Hirano

Linked Author(s): Kesayoshi Hadano

Keywords: No Keywords

Abstract: Oil spills normally result from accidents in the oil production and transportprocess,and there is little hope of eliminating them entirely.When such aproblem arises,there is an urgent need to estimate how rapidly the oil willspread,and how far it will cover in a given time.Fay et al.(1)have firststudied the spread of oil slick over calm water in a systematic way.From which,they have shown by essentially dimensional reasoning that the spreading processgoes through three stages depending upon the dominating forces at that time.Each stage can be characterized by power laws governing the size of the slick asa function of time,respectively. Recently,Noguchi &Hirano(2)have attemptedto predict an axisymmetrical oil spread on calm water on a theoretical basis,inwhich two basic equations were used to express the characteristics of oil slick:one was the conservation of volume and the other was the equation of motion.Byusing the kinematic wave theory,those equations were transformed into charac-teristic equations along the characteristic curve.These simultaneous equationswere solved to give the spreading rate of the oil front. This model has described the motion of theoil slick ranging from thegravity-inertial to the gravity-viscous spread.

DOI:

Year: 1989