Assessing In-Situ Burning as an Environmental Alternative for Oil Spill Mitigation
Event details
| Date | 28.02.2012 |
| Hour | 16:15 |
| Speaker | Prof. José Torero, BRE Trust/RAEng Professor of Fire Safety Engineering University of Edinburgh, UK |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
In-situ combustion of a slick of oil is a controversial but commonly discussed means of mitigating the environmental impact of an oil spill. The effectiveness of this countermeasure and potential environmental impact is intimately related to the burning characteristics. The burning rate of a slick of oil on a water bed is characterized by three distinct processes, ignition, flame spread and burning rate, the first two define the potential to burn and the latter controls the residual amount of oil after extinction. Characterization of ignition was shown not to be sufficient to assess the potential of an oil slick to burn, thus a series of flame spread experiments were conducted to characterize minimum burning sizes that enable self sustained burning. Analytical formulations for ignition and flame spread allowed extracting a series of parameters that could be used as criteria to decide if burning is an option. In a similar way, burning rate was calculated by a simple expression derived from a one-dimensional heat conduction equation. Heat feedback from the flame to the surface was assumed to be a constant fraction of the total energy released by the combustion reaction. The constant fraction (X) was named the burning efficiency and represents an important tool in assessing the oil consumption potential of in-situ burning. Theoretical expressions were first correlated with crude oil and heating oil, for a number of pool diameters and initial fuel layer thickness. Experiments were then conducted with emulsified and weathered crude oil. The simple analytical expressions describe well the effects of pool diameter and initial fuel layer thickness permitting a better observation of the effects of weathering, emulsification and net heat feedback to the fuel surface.
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Practical information
- General public
- Free
Contact
- Prof. Marc Parlange, EFLUM