Numerical simulation of oil spill trajectory of subsea pipeline under water current environment

To study the kinematic trajectory of micropore oil spill of subsea pipeline under the action of crosscurrent and its influential factors, this paper presents a 2D numerical model, which is built on the Fluent platform by using the standard k-ε equation model and multiphase flow VOF method, together with Reynolds Average Navier-Stokes (RANS) equation. The simulation results tally better with the experimental values of previous researchers. This paper also discusses the effect of the initial oil spill rate to water current rate ratio R₀ and the Froude number Fr₀ (oil density of ρ_o) of density at oil spill hole on the submarine drift trajectory of oil spill. The numerical simulation results reflect that, when R₀ is small and ρ_o is large, the spilled oil floats upward slowly inducing larger contamination range, and the location where oil film initially occurs on sea is horizontally far away from the oil spill hole, making discovery and cleaning of oil spill much difficult. The study results have practical significance in such aspects as emergency forecast of oil spill accident of subsea pipeline.