The Influence of Oil leaking rate and Ocean Current Velocity on the Migration and Diffusion of Underwater Oil Spill

Abstract Severe environmental pollution and huge economic losses would be caused by submarine oil spill with the increasing development of petroleum energy in sea. In order to predict the law of migration of oil spill from submarine pipelines accurately, the volume of fluid (VOF) model and realizable k-ε turbulence model were employed to establish numerical simulation of submarine oil spill, and the experiments were used to verify the feasibility of the numerical models. Different oil leaking rate and ocean velocity were simulated in the study. The simulation results indicated that comparing with oil leaking rate (set vertical migration velocity, U o ), current velocity (set horizontal migration velocity, U w ) has a greater influence on the migration of the oil spilling; the actual vertical migration velocity ( U o1 ), actual horizontal migration velocity ( U w1 ) and R 1 (the ratio of U o1 and U w1 ) are positively correlated with R (the ratio of U o and U w ), and they both fluctuate within a small range no matter how large R is; when 20 ≤ R ≤ 150, R 1 fits a linear fit curve with curve as R 1 = 0.66932 + 0.00215 R , which can provide a theoretical reference to the recovery system of underwater pipeline oil spilling emergency.