Surface Tracking Map: oil separation and droplet formation of a simulated oil-plume discharging from the ocean floor.

An in-house second order accurate finite-volume code “Chem3D” is used for simulation. The domain of interest is a rectangular box representing the ocean body with an oil-plume discharge at the bottom. The oil trajectory is identified via a multi-block surface tracking algorithm. An unstructured triangular mesh is identified as the oil-water interface, where as the bulk fluid is discretized using multi-block Cartesian cells. At each time step, the interface is advanced, and since it deforms in time, the interface mesh has to be regenerated. However, this approach provides a natural pathway to including surface tension and surface chemistry effects. Droplet breakoff is represented by a model, and separated droplets/bubbles are tracked individually. This method gives an approach towards accurate mapping of the oil separation and droplet formation effects. The velocity field data set provides geometrical coordinates used for modeling, velocity field, pressure field, flag indicator determining which volumetric grid contains the surface and phase indicator determining the different phases of the fluid. The data set is unsteady data set with ten timesteps which amounts to 1 second of physical time. The surface coordinates data set provides the evolution of the surface as the coordinates of the surface at each time step. Figure 1 shows the velocity contour at the final timestep at the symmetry plane. Figure 2 shows the tracked surface at the final timestep.