Author(s)

P. Sebastiao & C. Guedes Scares

Abstract

A model is proposed to describe the weathering of oil spills taking into account the spreading, evaporation, emulsification, viscosity and density increase of the oil. The crude is described by a set of eight fractions, including paraffin, cycloparaffm, aromatic, naphtenoaromatic fractions and a high density residual. The evaporation process is computed for each fraction separately using a "pseudo-component" approach. This model is compared with another one, developed in a previous work, which treats the oil as a whole and uses evaporative exposure approach to model evaporation. The comparison of the results obtained by the two models with experimental data available in the literature shows a significant improvement when the pseudo-component approa

Keywords