Despite the popular belief that crude oil is a mixture of hydrocarbons that floats on the surface of water, tar balls continue to wash up on beaches from the sea floor years after the Deep Water Horizon oil spill. This is because of the rarely studied weathering effects that occur during deep sea spills. While the evaporative weathering process of oil at the waters surface has been studied, no currently implemented models assess the weathering effects of dissolution within the water column. The evaporative effects at the sea surface and the dissolution of soluble components within droplets located in the water column leave a heavy fraction of oil that may sink. Laboratory experiments from previous work used hydrocarbon-like chemicals to form binary model oils. In contrast, experiments presented in this work use crude oil amended model oil (COA-MO) mixtures where the sinking of heavy fractions of crude oil does occur. The evaporative weathering binary model, when applied to COA-MO mixtures, was able to predict the sinking times of oil droplets using physical data of the three individual components of the mixture (crude oil, a light volatile, and heavy non-volatile chemical). The dissolution bonary model was able to predict the sinking times of COA-MO mixtures while submerged under water. A range of experimentally derived dissolution time constant, K, was obtained which could be applied to a broad spectrum of real world oils where the solubility of individual crude oil components varies greatly.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-07132015-093738 |
| Date | 29 July 2015 |
| Creators | Loebig, Cameron Joseph |
| Contributors | Overton, Ed, Valsaraj, Kalliat T., Thibodeaux, Louis J. |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-07132015-093738/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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