Development of oil spill tracking module

 

Marine environment and coastal regions are seriously influenced by industrial constructions located near (or far from) the coastal zones. In addition, marine traffic, industrial and commercial fleet are the other contributing factors affecting marine resources and environment. Gradual spread of these pollutions to coasts and islands causes the spread of irreparable genetic abnormalities and increases fatal diseases in the human population.

Existence of two large water borders in Iran, the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf in the south and the Caspian Sea in the North, and the country’s economy relying on exploitation and exporting oil, especially through the marine fleet, clearly indicate the probability of serious environmental damage caused by these industries.

Marine pollution resources including industrial wastewater, municipal and atomic wastes, volcanoes, storms and oil spill at sea adversely affect marine ecosystem. Considering all the pollutants, oil and petroleum hydrocarbons are of particular international importance in political, economic and scientific terms. Since oil resources have remarkable diversity and also the oil spill flow patterns are greatly affected by specific physical, chemical and biological factors, the study of marine oil pollution effects is complex and somehow difficult. However, these complexities make it easy to model other aforementioned pollutants.

Today, appropriate developed codes and powerful computers enable us to model complex flow domains.

Effectiveness of mechanical methods to control marine oil spills is limited to a certain region. Further, these response actions vary depending on changes in physical properties of oil including concentration and viscosity. Therefore, it is of high importance to predict oil spill flow pattern not only for preventing the spread of the pollution but also for selecting an effective method to remove and control the pollution.

This research program seeks to develop a powerful Persian computational tool for simulating advection and diffusion of oil pollution as well as predicting oil spill flow pattern, thereby identifying contaminated areas with a great accuracy and launching oil recovery and emergency operations faster.