A study on burning of crude oil in ice cavities

Abstract

I would like to express my gratitude to my advisor, Prof. Ali Rangwala for his guidance, patience, and providing all the means for doing research. It is a sincere pleasure to thank Prof. Kathy Notarianni who made the whole thing possible for me. I'm grateful that I got to conduct experiments and witness dozens of fire tests during my study. I must also thank Prof. Albert Simeoni who was able to provide me with useful insights for the most part of the project. I should also thank Dr. Lydia Shi lab manager of the Combustion Lab, Sreenivasan Ranganathan, Haoran Li, Minkyu Lee, and Andre DaVitoria who assisted me on every occasion I was in need of help with my experiments. Without question the previous work done by Peter Bellino was the best guidance I could ask. Finally, I would also like to thank my parents, elder sister, and two elder brothers. They were always supporting me and encouraging me with their best wishes even though they were thousands miles away.

Importance of the slick thickness for effective in-situ burning of crude oil

“…This size dependency for the BE has also been observed when comparing other large [13][14][15][16][17] and small scale [16,19,20] studies. Large scale experiments are known to have higher regression rates than smaller scales [38,39], peaking at a diameter of 1-2 m, and it is speculated that the highest BEs can only be obtained for pools above this size.…”

“…While high BEs of up to 99% have been achieved in both laboratory and large scale field experiments [13][14][15][16][17], lower BEs as low as 40% have also been reported [18][19][20]. As these experiments have been performed under widely varying conditions, such as differences in temperatures, oil types, oil amounts and the weathering state of the oils, it is difficult to determine which factors are responsible for these BE variations.…”

Experimental Procedure for Laboratory Studies of <em>In Situ</em> Burning : Flammability and Burning Efficiency of Crude Oil

“…In a previous study, we postulated that the main parameter that governs the burning efficiency is the heat feedback to the fuel surface 11 , which is a function of the pool diameter. The theory explains the apparent pool size dependency of the burning efficiency based on laboratory studies reporting low burning efficiencies (32-80%) 8,12,13 and large scale studies (pool diameter ≥2 m) reporting high burning efficiencies (90-99%) 14,15,16 . The method discussed herein was designed to test the proposed theory.…”