Experimental Investigation of Deep-Sea Oil Spills in a High-Pressure Laboratory Environment - 23

In the aftermath of the "Deepwater Horizon" oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the need arose for experimental data on oil and gas hydrodynamics and particle formation under deep-sea conditions. This work presents a new High-Pressure Test Center that allows for experimental oil spill research under artificial deep-sea conditions. It also contains experimental data on drop formation processes and oil drop size distributions generated within this test center and a modeling approach based on the turbulent energy dissipation that has been developed to predict the droplet sizes of an oil-and-gas jet under high pressure.