The mass transfer between non-aqueous phase liquid(NAPL) phase and soil gas phase in soil vapor extraction(SVE) process has been investigated by one-dimensional venting experiments. During quasi-steady volatilization of three single-component NAPLs in a sandy soil, constant initial lumped mass transfer coefficient (λgN,0) canbe obtained if the relative saturation (ξ) between NAPL phase and gas phase is higher than a critical value (ξc), andthe lumped mass transfer coefficient decreases with ξ when ξ＜ξc. It is also shown that the lumped mass transfercoefficient can be increased by blending porous micro-particles into the sandy soil because of the increasing of theinterfacial area.
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.
