Measurements of oil spill spreading in a wave tank using digital image processing

摘要

In this work, an experimetnal study of spreading of crude oil is carried out in a wave tank. The tests are performed by spilling differnet volumes and types of crude oil on the water surface. An experimental emasurement technique was developed based on digital processing of video imaes. The acquisition and processing of such images is carried out by using a video camera and inexpensive microcomputer hardware and software. Processing is carried out by first performing a digital image filter, then edge detection is performed on the filtered iamge data. The final result is a file that contains the coordinates of a polygon that encloses the observed slick for each time step. Different types of filters are actually used in order to adequately separate the color intensities corresponding to each of the elements in the image. Postprocessing of the vectorized images provides accurate measurements of the slick edge, thus obtaining a complete geometric representation, which is significantly different from simplified considerations of radially symmetric spreading. The spreading of the oil slick was recorded for each of the tests. Results of the experimetnal study are presented for each spreading regime, and analyzed in terms of the wave parameters such as period and wave height.