ABSTRACT
Burning of spilled oil has distinct advantages over other cleanup countermeasures. It offers the potential to convert rapidly large quantities of oil into its primary combustion products, carbon dioxide and water, with a small percentage of other unburned and residue byproducts. Disadvantages include the dispersal of the combustion products into the air.
Mesoscale and laboratory experiments have been conducted to measure the burning characteristics of crude oil fires. Measurements on crude oil pool fires from 0.4 m to 17.2 m in effective diameter were made to obtain data on the rate of burning, heat release rate, composition of the combustion products, and downwind dispersion of the products. The smaller experiments were performed in laboratories at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Fire Research Institute in Japan; and the larger ones at the U. S. Coast Guard Fire Safety and Test Detachment in Mobile, Alabama. From these experiments, the value for surface regression rate of a burning crude oil spill was found to be 0.055 mm/s.
A major concern for public safety is the content and extent of the smoke plume from the fires. Smoke yield, the fraction of the oil mass burned that is emitted as particulate, was found to be 13 percent. A large-eddy simulation calculation method for smoke plume trajectory and smoke particulate deposition developed by NIST showed that the smoke particulate deposition from a 114 m2 burn would occur in striations over a long, slender area 3.2 km wide and 258 km downwind of the burn.
