A Comparative Analysis of In-Situ Optical Velocimetries for Oil Spill Flow Rate Estimation

In the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, optical plume velocimetry (OPV), a flow measurement technique for use in seafloor hydrothermal systems, was found to have least uncertainty estimating rate at which escaping from well deep sea. However, OPV still had high of 21%, partly due limited accuracy temporal cross-correlation algorithm used. this work, several in-situ velocimetries, namely wavelet-based (WOV), OPV, and two classical correlation-based algorithms, fast Fourier transform (FFT) normalized (NCC), with Reynolds numbers varying 1847 11,656 investigated. WOV, FFT, NCC resulted rates closer expected turbulent as compared OPV. Moreover, noisy velocity field using The outperformed all based algorithms. measured an error 8.5% whereas errors 18.2%, 19.7%, 21.1% were obtained when applying NCC, respectively. There statistically significant difference between but no estimation three velocimetries. WOV other velocimetries estimated 8.5%, 50.8%,