Numerical modeling of oil spill containment by boom using SPH

The ocean environment is protected from oil pollution usually by using floating booms, which involves water-oil two-phase flow and strong fluid-structure interaction. In this paper, a modified multi-phase smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method is proposed to model oil spill containment by using a moving boom. Four major influencing factors including oil type, moving velocity and skirt angle of the boom, and water wave are investigated. The SPH simulation results demonstrate different typical boom failure modes found in laboratory experiments. It is shown that the ability of a boom in containing oil is not only affected by its own characteristics, but also closely related to external environmental factors. It is found that boom failure is more likely to happen for heavy oil, high boom velocity, negative skirt angle, and/or in the presence of water waves.