Grant: Engage Grants Program

Oil spills can cause severe environmental damage. On-site burning or chemical dispersant methods can be used in many situations, however these methods are highly toxic and fail in slightly rough seas. Oil recovery techniques have also been developed to recover oil using skimmer equipment installed in ships. The challenges arise when a vessel is operated in heavy sea and current conditions. The Extreme Spill Technology (EST) Inc. has recently developed an automated oil recovery technology using a vacuum device installed in a vessel. Initial tests have shown that the prototype vessel is efficient in oil recovery and it can potentially achieve high recovery efficiency in rough seas of both deepwater and shallow water. The objective of the project is to study the hydrodynamic performance of the vacuum tower developed by EST and to optimize its geometry for maximum oil recovery efficiency at various operation conditions. In this project, the multiple-phase problem, involving oil, water and air, will be solved by a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method. The volume of fluid (VOF) method will be used to capture the moving surfaces between the fluid phases. The outcome of the project will provide EST with the optimized vacuum structure and enable EST to build a full-size and ocean-going prototype. Further collaboration with EST will be identified to evaluate the performance of the prototype in large waves from this Engage project. The proposed research will contribute nationally and internationally to the field of computational fluid dynamics, especially numerical studies of multiple-phase flow. The project will facilitate the technology transfer to EST and the development of oil recovery technology which allows Canada to respond to oil spills in an efficient way. From this Engage project, a long-term collaborative relationship will be developed between the research team at Memorial University and EST.