SEDIMENT TRANSPORT AND CHEMICAL SPILL

Abstract

As Singapore is located in a busy waterway, an accidental release of chemicals into the coastal waters or toxic sediment transport will have serious impacts on both environment and economy of the country. In order to study these situations, the coastal circulation in the Strait of Singapore, chemical gas dispersion and sediment transport were investigated using numerical simulation in this project. A three-dimensional Princeton Ocean Model [Blumberg and Mellor (1987)], modified for the Strait of Singapore, was applied to coastal circulation modeling in the strait. The tidal effect, hydrodynamic pressure gradient, and wind conditions are for two typical monsoon seasons. A preliminary study of CO2 gas plume spreading on water surface near Jurong Island was then simulated by using a modified mass transfer coefficient of CO2, incorporating the above circulation model’s results, and a multi-species CFD modeling approach. Such a model demonstrated a modeling capability to consider the gas transfer effects from air into water through turbulence mixing and surface wind shear. In addition, a two-phase mixture model was carried out independently to simulate sediment transport in a small domain, which resembles part of the topology between Jurong Island and Mainland Singapore.