Cross-Flow, Non-Equilibrium Model of Air Sparging

According to the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA), air sparging is the most developed innovative
in-situ technology for groundwater remediation in USA. Air
sparging systems are easy to implement, and relatively
simple to operate. In addition, it is a relatively low cost
remediation technology that can be applied in conjunction
with other remediation technologies. For these reasons, air
sparging has become widely used. In this book the
investigation of various "rule of thumb" design protocols
for air sparging using a cross-flow two-compartment
numerical model to improve the efficiency of air sparging.
A numerical model was developed by the author and presented
here was concurrently used with multiphase flow software.
The recent developed model considers the contaminant
concentrations in the two compartments: gas and dissolved
phases. Mass balance has been applied for deriving a pair of
linked partial differential equations. A numerical technique
solution using the finite difference method has been used
simultaneously in solving for the contaminant concentration
in both gas and liquid phases. An analytical solution has
been derived and verified with the numerical solution.