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

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.