Groundwater remediation engineering–Study on the flow distribution of air sparging using acetylene

Article type: Research Article

Authors: ZHENG, Yan-mei | ZHANG, Ying | HUANG, Guo-qiang^; | JIANG, Bin | LI, Xin-gang^;

Affiliations: School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China | National Engineering Research Center of Distillation Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China

Note: [] Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: Air sparging (AS) is an emerging method to remove VOCs from saturated soils and groundwater. Air sparging performance highly depends on the air distribution resulting in the aquifer. In order to study gas flow characterization, a two-dimensional experimental chamber was designed and installed. In addition, the method by using acetylene as the tracer to directly image the gas distribution results of AS process has been put forward. Experiments were performed with different injected gas flow rates. The gas flow patterns were found to depend significantly on the injected gas flow rate, and the characterization of gas flow distributions in porous media was very different from the acetylene tracing study. Lower and higher gas flow rates generally yield more irregular in shape and less effective gas distributions.

Keywords: air sparging, gas flow pattern, groundwater, radius of influence (ROI)

Journal: Journal of Environmental Sciences, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 437-439, 2005