BSEE study on Burning Oil in Ice Cavities leads to new discovery
The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement's (BSEE) Oil Spill Response Research (OSRR) program has completed its review of an important new research project on burning oil in ice cavities and published the final results. The research project, funded by the bureau and completed by Worcester Polytechnic Institute in a lab, led to the discovery that the average burning rate is greater in an ice cavity than in a similarly-sized vessel or a pan. The objective of this study was to assess the In-situ burn efficiency of oil spills in icy conditions and explore oil spill burning on ice. The fundamental problem of burning oil in an ice cavity is new to the fire science community, as such there were no prior experiments on the subject. This study included a series of experiments that were conducted to develop an understanding of the burning of crude oil in ice cavities. Alaska North Slope crude oil (~1.5 cm thick) was placed within ice cavities (5 - 100 cm wide and 6 - 25 cm high). It was found that because of the cavity expansion the average mass transfer of crude oil in the ice cavity is greater than in a similar-sized vessel ...
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