Dispersão e contenção de Poluentes orgânicos em meio aquoso : modelagem e simulação.

Abstract

Oil and its derivatives are one of the main sources of energy used by humanity today, however, from the extraction process to the consumption of the product, the environment is subject to environmental damage, such as accidents resulting from leaks that can be caused by failures. humans, natural events, corrosion, breakage in devices or pipes or mechanical failure. The knowledge of the dispersion of aromatic hydrocarbons (benzene, toluene, ethyl-benzene and xylene – BTEX, for example) and non-hydrocarbons that constitute petroleum has been the subject of several studies as a result of environmental damage. The high level of toxicity of BTEX can cause diseases such as cancer. After a bibliographic survey, it was noticed a scarcity of studies related to the dispersion of organic pollutants in aquatic and atmospheric environments. Thus, the purpose of this work is to evaluate the behavior of oil dispersion and aromatic components, more specifically benzene, in an aquatic environment in the presence or not of containment barriers. The equations of conservation of mass and linear momentum in transient regime were solved by adopting the Volume of fluid (VOF) approach together with the realizable k-ɛ turbulence model. Considering the regime, the open channel boundary condition was adopted, available in the Ansys Fluent® application. The mesh convergence index (ICM) was applied to evaluate the quality and independence of the results in relation to the computational mesh used. The numerical results showed a good agreement with the experimental data reported in the literature and illustrate how the advective dispersion of organic pollutants behaves with the variation of the parameters water and pollutant velocity, density, volumetric fraction and the presence of the oil containment barrier on the surface of the water with and without waves. The adopted model presented satisfactory results to represent the advective dispersion of pollutants in aquatic environments, as well as the containment of pollutants through the use of a fixed barrier.