INVESTIGATION OF INTERACTION BETWEEN SEA WATER AND CRUDE OIL IN OPEN ENDED STORAGE TANKS USING BOUNDARYELEMENT METHOD

Underwater oil tanks are commonly used in marine industries, but open ended storage tanks are new and have some advantages. In these devices interaction between sea water and crude oil isvery important due to their oil pollution risk. In this study, boundary element method was used to model sea wave propagation on a hemisphere shape under water tank and oil-water common surface oscillation in the tank. Also, kinematic and dynamic boundary conditions of free surfaceand common surface of oil and water were discritized by Finite difference method. The wave specifications and water depths, which were entered in numerical model, were extracted from Geographic and climatic profiles of Abuzar oil field region in Persian Gulf. The results show an acceptable accordance with other researches. Also, the results illustrated that, using open endedstorage tanks near our offshore platforms has not any problem and it can be a good proposal for oil storing by considering their advantages

Keywords:

BEM (boundary element method) , open ended storage tanks(OEST) , oil-water interface