Michel Boufadel, a distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering who specializes in environmental fluid mechanics and hydrology, is one of the world’s chief experts on oil dispersion in the wake of major spills and a frequent consultant on clean-ups. These disasters include releases from the Exxon Valdez, a tanker that ran aground in Prince William Sound, the Deepwater Horizon, a burst well in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Enbridge pipeline in Michigan in 2010, which spewed more than a million gallons in the Kalamazoo River.
Through experimentation and modeling, his research tackles unanswered questions about the mechanics of spills and the effectiveness of remedial methods.
In a 600-ft.-long saltwater wave tank on the coast of New Jersey, he and a team of NJIT researchers conducted, for example, the largest-ever simulation of the Deepwater Horizon spill to determine more precisely where hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil dispersed following the drilling rig’s explosion in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The initial phase of the experiment involved releasing several thousand gallons of oil from a one-inch pipe dragged along the bottom of the tank in order to reproduce ocean current conditions.
His team determined that the use of dispersants had a substantial impact on air quality in the region of the spill by reducing the amount of toxic compounds such as benzene that reached the surface of the ocean, thus protecting emergency workers on the scene from the full brunt of the pollution. Their study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Over the past decade, Boufadel, director of NJIT’s Center for Natural Resources, has served on six National Academy of Sciences committees on oil spills, as well as a committee of the Royal Society of Canada. He was recruited by the government of Ecuador to address oil spills in the Amazon forest in its litigation against Chevron. A paper that he and a colleague published in NATURE Geoscience in 2010 explained the reasons behind the persistence of the Exxon Valdez, and was relied upon in the U.S. Department of Justice case against Exxon Mobil. He has obtained $13 million in funding from national and international agencies to pursue his research.
He is currently investigating the transport of dispersed droplets in rivers and their interaction with sediment particles, which leads to the formation of oil particle aggregates, as well as the impact of waves on oil spread.
His interest in fluid mechanics is not restricted to spills. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, he and a team of environmental engineers and modelers studied the virus’s pathways inside supermarkets. He and colleagues at NJIT, Princeton and Duke later developed a model that predicts where the disease will spread from an outbreak, in what patterns and how quickly. That paper was also published in PNAS.
More recently Boufadel is developing a “Community Intrinsic Resilience Index” to evaluate a municipality or county’s ability to prepare for, respond to and recover following disruptive events at various levels of severity. It looks at impacts on transportation, energy, health and socio-economics.