Developments in Rheology for Environmental and Process Engineering

Two major industrial/environmental disasters occurred in 2010. Firstly, on 20 April an oil rig belonging to BP blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, releasing daily, about 10 million liters of crude oil in the ocean. Secondly, on 4 October a dam retaining waste materials of a factory producing aluminium in Hungary suddenly collapsed, releasing more than one million cubic meters of toxic red mud. It is obvious that the final impact of these two disasters (yet to come) will be tragic. Meanwhile, one lesson that can be learnt from them is that a failure in a given process can lead to a major environmental disaster. So, process and environment can sometimes be strongly associated. This paper was written on that basic assumption, by revisiting dam-break flows, gravity currents and core flows of complex fluids.

Blaise Nsom is Professor of Mechanics, Materials and Sustainable Development at Brest University (France) since 2000; Karim Bouchlaghem is Associate Professor of Physics and Executive Director at Ecole Polytechnique of Sousse (Tunisia); Ahmad Ahmad, Engineer and Doctor in Mechanics is Senior Executive at the Fertilizer Plant of Homs (Syria).