Publications related to Oil spill

Long-term biodegradation of crude oil in high-arctic backshore sediments: The Baffin Island Oil Spill (BIOS) after nearly four decades

With an on-going disproportional warming of the Arctic Ocean and the reduction of the sea ice cover, the risk of an accidental oil spill from ships or future oil exploration is increasing. It is hence important to know how crude oil weathers in this enviro ...

2023

Natural slicks on Lake Geneva: From small-scale effects to large-scale formation and distribution

Mehrshad Foroughan

Low wind speeds (< 4 m/s) are ubiquitous in many water bodies, yet the physical processes occurring at the air-water interface in this range are poorly understood. A notable example is smooth patches on the water surface, known as natural slicks, formed wh ...

EPFL2023

Monodisperse Selectively Permeable Hydrogel Capsules Made from Single Emulsion Drops

Esther Amstad, Alexandre Louis André Persat, Huachuan Du, Mathias Steinacher, Alice Cont

Capsules are often used to protect chemical and biological entities from the environment, to control the timing and location of their release, or to facilitate the collection of waste. Their performance depends on the thickness and composition of their she ...

2021

A Closing Window of Opportunity to Save a Unique Marine Ecosystem

Anders Meibom, Maoz Fine

Five years in the making, a massive oil spill of 1 million barrels is imminent in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen. Emergent action must be taken by the United Nations and its International Maritime Organization (IMO) to remove the oil, despite regional ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2020

Mitigation of impact of a major benzene spill into a river through flow control and in-situ activated carbon absorption

David Andrew Barry, Yue Yang

Benzene is a toxic contaminant and can harm many aquatic species and cause serious damages to the river eco-system, if released to rivers. In 2012, a major spill accident occurred on the Huaihe River in Eastern China with 3 tons of benzene released to the ...

2020

Measurement of the muon flux from 400 GeV/c protons interacting in a thick molybdenum/tungsten target

Lesya Shchutska, Aurelio Bay, Guido Haefeli, Elena Graverini, Mikhail Chapochnikov, Alexey Boyarsky, Federico Leo Redi, Maria Elena Stramaglia, Inar Timiryasov, Alexandre Emmanuel Grandchamp, Oleg Ruchayskiy, Nikolaos Charitonidis, Ana Bárbara Rodrigues Cavalcante, Jean-Loup Tastet, Ekaterina Kuznetsova, Hans Dijkstra, Anton Petrov, Sergei Smirnov

The SHiP experiment is proposed to search for very weakly interacting particles beyond the Standard Model which are produced in a 400 GeV/c proton beam dump at the CERN SPS. About 1011muons per spill will be produced in the dump. To design the experiment s ...

2020

Cost and benefits of climate change in Switzerland

Philippe Thalmann, Marc Vielle, Frank Vöhringer, Boris Thurm, Dario Stocker, Wolfgang Knoke, Anita Frehner

Understanding the economic magnitude of climate change impacts is a prerequisite for developing adequate adaptation strategies. In Switzerland, despite new climate scenarios and impact studies, only few impacts have been monetized. Our objective is to asse ...

2019

Microscale physico-chemical interactions between hydrodynamically confined liquids and immersed biological surfaces

David Philipp Taylor

In contrast to conventional microfluidics, where liquids are typically manipulated within closed channels, open-space microfluidics has emerged as a new class of techniques that are well suited for ver-satile interaction with biological substrates. In part ...

EPFL2019

Hydration mediated interfacial transitions on mixed hydrophobic/hydrophilic nanodroplet interfaces

Sylvie Roke, Halil Ibrahim Okur, Nikolay Smolentsev, Rüdiger Scheu, Filip Kovacik

Interfacial phase transitions are of fundamental importance for climate, industry, and biological processes. In this work, we observe a hydration mediated surface transition in supercooled oil nanodroplets in aqueous solutions using second harmonic and sum ...

2018

Comparison of methylisoborneol and geosmin abatement in surface water by conventional ozonation and an electro-peroxone process

Urs von Gunten, Gang Yu, Yan Wang, Chao Chen

In this study methylisoborneol (MIB) and geosmin abatement in a surface water by conventional ozonation and the electro-peroxone (E-peroxone) process was compared. Batch tests with addition of ozone (03) stock solutions and semi-batch tests with continuous ...

Elsevier2017

Environmental Monitoring using Autonomous Vehicles: A Survey of Recent Searching Techniques

Auke Ijspeert, Alessandro Crespi

Autonomous vehicles are becoming an essential tool in a wide range of environmental applications that include ambient data acquisition, remote sensing, and mapping of the spatial extent of pollutant spills. Among these applications, pollution source locali ...

Elsevier2017

Oxidative stability and microstructure of 5% fish-oil-enriched granola bars added natural antioxidants derived from brown alga Fucus vesiculosus

Louise Helene Soegaard Jensen

The aims of this study were to (i) investigate the ability of Icelandic brown algae Fucus vesiculosus extracts to inhibit lipid oxidation in granola bars fortified with fish oil-in-water emulsion; (ii) investigate whether addition of the seaweed extracts a ...

Wiley-Blackwell2017

Assessing the impacts of climate change for Switzerland

Philippe Thalmann, Marc Vielle, Frank Vöhringer, Boris Thurm, Sophie Maire, Wolfgang Knoke, Dario Stocker, Anita Frehner

Understanding the economic magnitude of climate change impacts is a prerequisite for developing adequate adaptation strategies. In Switzerland, despite new climate scenarios and impacts studies, only few impacts have been monetized. Our objective is to ass ...

2017

Entrainement de bois flottant dans un déversoir a crête standard avec piliers: Influence des caractéristiques de bois flottant en probabilités de blocage

Anton Schleiss, Michael Pfister, José Pedro Gamito de Saldanha Calado Matos, Paloma Furlan

Spillways are safety elements of dams that allow to release floods. They spill water to avoid overtopping with its potential structural damages at the dam and the downstream environment. Nevertheless it may be unsafe to assume that a flood only carries cle ...

Société hydrotechnique de France2017

Working fluid charge reduction. Part II: Supercritical CO2 gas cooler designed for light commercial appliances

John Richard Thome, Jackson Braz Marcinichen

The present study focused on the thermal hydraulic performance improvement of a CO2 gas cooler with the principal goal of reducing its volume, and consequently the necessary charge of the working fluid. To achieve this compactness, the leading methods for ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2016

Envirobot: A Bio-Inspired Environmental Monitoring Platform

Auke Ijspeert, Alessandro Crespi

Autonomous marine vehicles are becoming essential tools in aquatic environmental monitoring systems, and can be used for instance for data acquisition, remote sensing, and mapping of the spatial extent of pollutant spills. In this work, we present an uncon ...

Ieee2016

Investigating the fate of petroleum fluids released in the marine environment with comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography and transport models

Jonas Gros

Anthropogenic releases of petroleum fluids, which contain thousands of compounds, represent a threat to marine environments. However, there was a lack of models able to explain the independent behaviors of the numerous compounds of a spilled petroleum flui ...

EPFL2016

Systematic errors of skin-friction measurements by oil-film interferometry

Peter Monkewitz, Jean-Daniel Rüedi

In recent years, the independent measurement of wall shear stress with oil-film or oil-drop interferometry has become a cornerstone of turbulent-boundary-layer research as many arguments depend critically on a precise knowledge of the skin friction tau(w)* ...

Cambridge University Press2015

Dynamic investigation of nutrient consumption and injection strategy in microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) by means of large-scale experiments

Koen Blanckaert

Microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) depends on the in situ microbial activity to release trapped oil in reservoirs. In practice, undesired consumption is a universal phenomenon but cannot be observed effectively in small-scale physical simulations due t ...

Springer2015

First day of an oil spill on the open sea: Early mass transfers of hydrocarbons to air and water

Jeremy Samuel Arey, Jonas Gros, Deedar Nabi

During the first hours after release of petroleum at sea, crude oil hydrocarbons partition rapidly into air and water. However limited information is available about very early evaporation and dissolution processes. We report on the composition of the oil ...

Amer Chemical Soc2014