Michel C Boufadel

New Jersey Institute of Technology | NJIT · Center for Natural Resources Development and Protection

The interactions between the atmosphere, ocean, and beach in the swash zone are dynamic, influencing water flux and solute exchange across the land‐sea interface. This study employs groundwater simulations to examine the combined effects of waves and evaporation on subsurface flow and salinity dynamics in a shallow beach environment. Our simulation...

While green infrastructures (GIs) are used to address urban flooding and stormwater runoff and enhance sustainability, their implementation faces challenges such as limited funding and competing priorities. Existing studies generally focused on specific/individual GI practices, potentially overlooking the broader benefits or values of comprehensive...

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are fluorinated and refractory pollutants that are ubiquitous in industrial wastewater. Photocatalytic destruction of such pollutants with catalysts such as TiO2 and ZnO is an attractive avenue for removal of PFAS, but refined forms of such photocatalysts are expensive. This study, for the first time, util...

Inland oil spill accidents pose a negative impact on the health of the soil ecological system and human beings. The oil infiltration process is the main behavior of spilled oil, and its infiltration is influenced by many environmental factors like root netting and rainfall. This study was conducted to investigate the impact of these two important f...

Rain gardens, a type of green infrastructure (GI), have been recognized for mitigating flooding and improving water quality from minor storms by trapping stormwater pollutants. Yet, the capability of these systems to retain microplastics (MPs) from stormwater, especially in size <125 μm, remains inadequately understood. This study investigated the...

Microplastics pose a significant and growing threat to marine ecosystems and human health. Rivers serve as critical pathways for the entry of inland-produced microplastics into marine environments. In this paper, we developed a numerical modeling scheme using OpenFOAM to investigate the fate and transport of microplastics in a river system. Our sim...

Solar Irradiance depicts the light energy produced by the Sun that hits the Earth. This energy is important for renewable energy generation and is intrinsically fluctuating. Forecasting solar irradiance is crucial for efficient solar energy generation and management. Work in the literature focused on the short-term prediction of solar irradiance, u...

Urban areas play a significant role in generating microplastics (MPs) through increased vehicular and human activities, making urban runoff a key source of MP pollution in receiving waterways. The composition of MPs is anticipated to vary with land use; hence, identifying the hotspots of contamination within urban areas is imperative for the target...

Groundwater mixing dynamics play a crucial role in the biogeochemical cycling of shallow wetlands. In this paper, we conducted groundwater simulations to investigate the combined effects of evaporation and local heterogeneity on mixing dynamics in shallow wetland sediments. The results show that evaporation causes groundwater and solutes to upwell...

Oil weathering models are essential for predicting the behavior of spilled oil in the environment. Most models use a "Pseudo Component" (PC) approach to represent the wide range of compounds found in petroleum products. Within the approach, rather than modeling each individual compound in an oil, a manageable number of PCs are developed that repres...

Oil dispersion by the application of chemical dispersants is an important tool in oil spill response, but it is difficult to quantify in the field in a timely fashion that is useful for coordinators and decision-makers. One option is the use of rugged portable field fluorometers that can deliver essentially instantaneous results if access is attain...

Laboratory preparation of aqueous test media is a critical step in developing toxicity information needed for oil spill response decision-making. Multiple methods have been used to prepare physically and chemically dispersed oils which influence test outcome, interpretation, and utility for hazard assessment and modeling. This paper aims to review...

General Circulation Models (GCMs) are established numerical models for simulating multiple climate variables, decades into the future. GCMs produce such simulations at coarse resolution (100 to 600 km), making them inappropriate to monitor climate change at the local regional level. Downscaling approaches are usually adopted to infer the statistica...

A mesoscale oil spill test tank located in Natural Resources Canada research facility at CanmetENERGY Devon (AB, Canada) was used to study the mixing energy and particle behavior near the shorelines. Four types of waves have been generated in the tank where the instantaneous velocities were measured using an acoustic doppler velocimeter (ADV), and...

After an oil spill incident, the spilled oil slicks are observed to migrate to the shoreline area. Under the turbulent conditions, they break into small droplets and are suspended in the water column. The dispersed droplets are expected to interact with the suspended particles and form the oil-particle aggregates (OPAs), which significantly changes...

Spilled oil slicks are likely to break into droplets in the subtidal and intertidal zones of seashores due to wave energy. The nonliving suspended fine particles in coastal ecosystems can interact with the dispersed oil droplets, resulting in the formation of Oil Particle Aggregates (OPAs). Many investigations assumed that these aggregates will set...

The need for the efficient remediation of soils impacted by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) is substantially growing because of the notable upsurge in societal and regulatory awareness of this class of chemicals. To remediate PFAS-contaminated soils using mobilization approaches, the choice of appropriate techniques highly depends on the...

Various stormwater best management practices and green infrastructures (GIs) are recommended to address flooding, stormwater runoff, water quality, and sustainability. While detention basins are considered one of the main GI strategies, their benefits cannot be fully realized without properly maintaining them and making sure that they stay operatio...

Deepwater hydrocarbon releases experience complex chemical and physical processes. To assess simplifications of these processes on model predictions, we present a sensitivity analysis using simulations for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. We compare the buoyant multiphase plume metrics (trap height, rise time etc), the hydrocarbon mass flowrates at...

The freshwater transport (FWT) by the Labrador Current (LC) around the Grand Banks of Newfoundland (GBN) is diagnosed with the 26-year Global Ocean Physical Reanalysis 1/12° data (GLORYS12v1) during 1993 - 2018. The time-mean FWT of the LC above the 1027.25 kg/m³ isopycnal surface is 83.6 mSv (1 mSv = 10³m³/s) southward through the Flemish Pass. Am...

We present an analysis of 2225 simulations of artificial oil well blowouts in nearshore and offshore waters of Newfoundland, Canada. In the simulations, we coupled the VDROP-J and TAMOC models to simulate the fate and transport of oil and gas from the release to the sea surface. Simulations were conducted with and without subsea dispersant injectio...

The resilience of communities has emerged as a major goal in policy and practice. Cities, states, and counties within the United States and around the world are passing laws requiring the incorporation of climate-related hazard vulnerability assessments within their master plan updates for resilience planning and design. The resilience of communiti...

What could a research team accomplish if given access to the latest GPU hardware? A molecular dynamics research team could process protein-ligand tests using 100 GPUs on Delta in about 3.6 days, a task that would take their local lab a full year using their own GPU hardware. A team exploring the wonders of cosmic rays is now part of the multi-messe...

The impact of climate change on the environment has become increasingly visible today, and foreseeing future climate events, which involves long-term prediction of climate variables (e.g., temperature, wind speed, precipitation, etc.) at a local small scale in a local region, is crucial for disaster risk management. General Circulation Models (GCMs...

There has been an increase in marine transportation in cold regions, which in turn has led to an increasing risk of oil spills in these areas. To better support risk assessment and pollution control of oil spills, it is important to have a good understanding of oil transport in the environment. This information is essential to manage response prior...

Since nearly half of the world's population lives near the coast, coastal areas have become hotspots for microplastic (MP) pollution due to human activity. The ubiquity of natural colloids in coastal waters plays a critical role in the potential fate of, and risks posed by, MPs. Nevertheless, far less has been known regarding the aggregation of MPs...

Transportation is a critical sector for communities. It is, however, particularly vulnerable to climate change, and a disruption in its infrastructure impacts the whole community. Enhancing the resilience of transportation infrastructure is vital for reliable and sustainable functionalities, and subsequently, to more resilient communities. There ar...

Wind dynamics are extremely complex and have critical impacts on the level of damage from natural hazards, such as storms and wildfires. In the wake of climate change, wind dynamics are becoming more complex, making the prediction of future wind characteristics a more challenging task. Nevertheless, having long-term projections of some wind charact...

A local droplet size distribution (DSD) from a jet in crossflow can overestimate or underestimate the overall DSD in the plume based on the measurement location. The overall DSD is crucial to evaluate the fate of oil droplets in the water column for a proper countermeasure following an oil spill. We present experimental results of a vertical oil je...

Growing concerns over the risk of accidental releases of oil into the marine environment have emphasized our need to improve both oil spill preparedness and response strategies. Among the available spill response options, dispersants offer the advantages of breaking oil slicks into small oil droplets and promoting their dilution, dissolution, and b...

In situ burning (ISB) hasn’t been widely used for offshore oil spill response for various reasons. We present a feasibility study for a new ISB method – the Burning Tongue (BT) concept. We conducted scaled experiments in the Ohmsett wave tank to demonstrate its feasibility. We produced a 35-m long “tongue” of burnable oil (average oil thickness 4.2...

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was the largest in US history, covering more than 1,000 km of shorelines and causing losses that exceeded $50 billion. While oil transformation processes are understood at the laboratory scale, the extent of the Deepwater Horizon spill made it challenging to integrate these processes in...

The biodegradation of dispersed crude oil in the ocean is relatively rapid (a half-life of a few weeks). However, it is often much slower on shorelines, usually attributed to low moisture content, nutrient limitation, and higher oil concentrations in beaches than in dispersed plumes. Another factor may be the increased salinity of the upper interti...

Wind plays a crucial part during adverse events, such as storms and wildfires, and is a widely leveraged source of renewable energy. Predicting long-term daily local wind speed is critical for effective monitoring and mitigation of climate change, as well as to locate suitable locations for wind farms. Long-term simulations of wind dynamics (until...

The release and transport of benzene in coastal aquifers were investigated in the present study. Numerical simulations were implemented using the SEAM3D, coupled with GMS, to study the behavior of benzene in the subsurface of tidally influenced beaches. The transport and fate of the benzene plume were simulated, considering advection, dispersion, s...

In the event that an Arctic oil spill occurs, oil spill modelers need to understand how oil moves along the subsurface of sea ice to predict how a slick will migrate. Currently, modeling the subsurface topography of sea ice has been hampered by a lack of understanding of this complex surface. Using sonar data from the Chukchi Sea, an investigation...

Community resilience refers to the degree to which a community can survive and recover following a disaster. While resilience itself is well understood, decisions that would enhance resilience are interdependent and involve various stakeholders. There are indices for evaluating community resilience, but these have the shortcoming that they compare...

The dispersion of oil droplets near ocean surface is important for evaluating the impact to the environment. Under breaking wave conditions, the surface oil experiences mainly two processes: the generation of oil droplets at/near the water surface, and the transport of oil droplets due to ocean dynamics. We investigated the vertical behavior by inc...

The preparation of Water-accommodated Fractions (WAFs) and chemically enhanced WAFs (CEWAFs) are essential for evaluating oil toxicity. The Chemical Response to Oil Spills: Ecological Research Forum (CROSERF) method was widely adopted, with variables (e.g., mixing time, oil loading, etc.) being continuously changed among research groups, which limi...

Experiments were performed to understand the impact of the orifice on droplet size in the shear breakup region. Oil jet was released vertically from two orifice types: a pipe and a converging nozzle. The roll-up vortices were observed clearly near the edge of the jet with nozzle orifice while elongated oil ligaments in the jet direction were mostly...

General Circulation Models (GCMs) allow for the simulation of several climate variables through the year 2100. GCM simulations, however, are too coarse to monitor climate change at a local scale in a local region. Hence, one needs to perform spatial downscaling for these simulations, where statistical downscaling is often used. Statistical downscal...

In-situ burning can be used to prevent oil spreading in oil spill response. In this study, a steady-state Gaussian plume model was applied to analyze the concentration distribution of fine particulate matter produced by in-situ burning, as well as to assess the health risks associated with different combustion methods and ambient conditions, in ref...

Understanding the size of oil droplets released from a jet in crossflow is crucial for estimating the trajectory of hydrocarbons and the rates of oil biodegradation/dissolution in the water column. We present experimental results of an oil jet with a jet-to-crossflow velocity ratio of 9.3. The oil was released from a vertical pipe 25 mm in diameter...

Wave tank experiments were performed to measure the droplets size distribution under the plunging breaking wave. A deep-water plunging breaker of height 20 cm was generated using the dispersive focusing method, and a shadowgraph camera was used to take images of droplets and bubbles of different sizes. For droplets smaller than the 1000 microns, th...

Modeling oil biodegradation and remediation has become an increasingly important means to predict oil persistence and explore potential in-situ bioremediation strategies for oil-contaminated beaches. Beaches involve complex mixing dynamics between seawater and groundwater. Thus, numerically predicting oil biodegradation within beach systems faces m...

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon (DWH) blowout released 3.19 million barrels (435 000 tons) of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Driven by currents and wind, an estimated 22 000 tons of spilled oil were deposited onto the northeastern Gulf shorelines, adversely impacting the ecosystems and economies of the Gulf coast regions. In this work we present fie...

The use of dispersants can be an effective response tool for large offshore spills by applying dispersants on unemulsified slicks and treating as much oil as possible before it becomes too viscous. Assessing the dispersibility of an oil slick under actual environmental conditions is an important step in spill response decision-making. This research...

Langmuir supercells (LS) are full-depth Langmuir circulations in unstratified shallow shelves. A Reynolds-averaged Eulerian formulation is developed resolving LS as a secondary component to the wind-driven mean shear current. This formulation is combined with Lagrangian particle tracking to investigate oil droplet entrainment induced by LS as a fun...

Coastal beach aquifers are biogeochemically active systems that mediate chemical and material fluxes across the land-sea interface. This paper provides a review of major physical stressors and geologic features that influence flow and solute fate and transport in coastal beach aquifers. We outline current understanding of the interactions between t...

Understanding the droplet size distribution of subsea oil releasing is important to predict the subsequent transport and degradation of the spilled oil. Single- and multi-phase oil jet experiments were conducted in the Ohmsett facility, including pure oil jet and oil-air jet through a 10.7-mm pipe and a 4.7-mm pipe. Measurements of the vertical jet...

The increasing oil demand and busy waterways highlight the importance of oil spill preparedness and responses. Dispersants attract attention as an effective response tool to manage the impacts of major spill incidents. Despite in-depth laboratory evaluations on the effectiveness of chemical dispersants and their impacts on the transportation and fa...

Spilled oil slicks are likely to break into droplets offshore due to wave energy. The fate and transport of such droplets are affected by suspended particles in local marine environment, through forming oil particle aggregates (OPAs). OPA formation is affected by various factors, including the mixing energy and duration. To evaluate these two facto...

Oil spills are a serious environmental problem. To better support risk assessment and pollution control for oil spills, a good understanding of oil transport in the environment is required. This study focused on the numerical simulation of the nearshore oil behaviors based on computational fluid dynamics. Based on the Navier-Stokes momentum equatio...

The shorelines frequently suffer adverse impacts from oil spill accidents. As one important technique of shoreline cleanup, the application of surface washing agents (SWAs) can help achieve high oil removal from shoreline substrates with less damage to affected zone. In this study, a framework for evaluation and selection of SWAs in oil spill incid...

Marine oil spills pose a significant threat to ocean and coastal ecosystems. In addition to costs incurred by response activities, an economic burden could be experienced by stakeholders dependent on coastal resources. Decision support tools for oil spill response (OSR-DSTs) have been playing an important role during oil spill response operations....

The tempo-spatial patterns of Covid-19 infections are a result of nested personal, societal, and political decisions that involve complicated epidemiological dynamics across overlapping spatial scales. High infection “hotspots” interspersed within regions where infections remained sporadic were ubiquitous early in the outbreak, but the spatial sign...

During undersea oil blowout in crossflow conditions, the oil droplets entrained horizontally which increased the residence time of droplets in the water column. Knowledge of the trajectory of an oil plume is important for predicting the pathways of hydrocarbons and to devise countermeasures. We conducted large-scale experiments in the Ohmsett tank...

Oil droplets in marine environment interact with particles to form oil particle aggregates (OPA). As it was argued that the hydrophobicity of particles impacts the formation of OPA and subsequently the entrapment of oil and the transport of OPA, this study altered the hydrophobicity of kaolinite through the addition of chitosan and the contact angl...

Understanding the shear breakup in jet flows and the formation of droplets from ligaments is important to determine the final droplet size distribution (DSD). The initial droplet size, which affects the final DSD, is considered to be generated by the shear breakup. Large-eddy simulation (LES) was performed to investigate the shear breakup in liquid...

The salinity of the upper parts of seashores can become higher than seawater due to evaporation between tidal inundations. Such hypersaline ecosystems, where the salinity can reach up to eight-fold higher than that of seawater (30-35 g/L), can be contaminated by oil spills. Here we investigate whether such an increase has inhibitory effects on oil...

The world consumes approximately 5.1 billion tons of crude oil per year, with the United States and Saudi Arabia producing the largest shares [1]. Countries rely on various means for transporting crude oil [1, 2]. Large vessel/tankers transport oil at sea, while oil is transported inland via pipelines, railroads, trucks, and barges [2]. Unfortunate...

Oil droplets in marine environment interact with particles to form oil particle aggregates (OPA), and alters the transport and fate of oil. We investigated the impact of particles properties on the formation of OPAs. It was found that the distribution of 9 μm spherical silica (sand) particles on the oil droplet was more uniform than the 3 μm silica...

Removal of hydrocarbons from sediments could be achieved using various techniques such as hydraulic flushing aided by surfactants, which works well for sand and gravel but not as effective for finer textured media, such as clay. Electrokinetics (EK) emerged as an effective method to remediate fine-grained soils, especially when combined with the ap...

Physical transport processes such as the circulation and mixing of waters largely determine the spatial distribution of materials in the ocean. They also establish the physical environment within which biogeochemical and other processes transform materials, including naturally occurring nutrients and human-made contaminants that may sustain or harm...

A numerical framework was developed to study oil-particle aggregate (OPA) formation by incorporating NEMO3D code and the A-DROP model into an open-source platform, OpenFOAM. The developed framework was then used to study oil transport and OPA formation in a two-dimensional (2D) hypothetical river at a depth of 3.0 m. The river's hydrodynamic profil...

Oil and fuel spills occur regularly in terrestrial and aquatic environments and substances such as crude oil can contain many compounds that are highly resistant to degradation. Among these constituents are alkanes and monoaromatic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are not only toxic but also carcinogenic and/or mutagenic. Provided...

The transport of virus-laden particles was investigated numerically in an archetypical supermarket configuration of area 1,200 m 2 and ceiling height of 4.5 m. The particles were tracked using a Lagrangian particle tracking code coupled with the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model Ansys Fluent. Air transport was assumed to occur due to indoor...

We used multifractals to analyze the Lebanese topography focusing on Mount Lebanon. The elevation data were obtained from NASA STRM Global Digital Elevation of Earth Land, spaced at 80[Formula: see text]m in the East-West direction, and at 90[Formula: see text]m in the North-South direction. After transforming the grid to be perpendicular and paral...

Nonaqueous phase liquids (NAPL) tend to be trapped within aquifers. The review first covers conventional technologies that rely on pumping water, hot water, and/or air sparging with vapor extraction. The review then addresses polymer and foam delivery, which are intended to directly add solutions to low-permeability zones, where NAPL resides. Based...