Oil Spill Accidents off the Coast of Sâo Paulo State: History, Modelling and Simulations

In this work we present a classical evolution equation for the movement of oil slicks in marine water in its second phase (Fay, 1969), and, setting it in its variational formulation, discretize it with a view towards the use of the Finite Element Method(using first degree approximations for oil concentration). For simulating marine currents, special upwinding techniques are adopted so as to eliminate main oscillations caused by numerical options. These currents are given by the solution of Stokes' equation using second order finite elements for velocities and discontinuous piecewise constant elements. Boundary conditions are obtained from data presented in (Furtado,1978). Resulting currents were then used for a qualitative simulation so as to verify the model comparing it to registered information (CETESB, 1996).