The New Jersey Institute of Technology's
Electronic Theses & Dissertations Project

Title:	A field study coupling soil fractionation and sonic energy for enhancing the in situ removal of volatile organic compounds in the vadose zone
Author:	Kaleem, Hassan
View Online:	njit-etd1999-065 (xviii, 165 pages ~ 7.8 MB pdf)
Department:	Department of Chemical Engineering, Chemistry and Environmental Science
Degree:	Master of Science
Program:	Chemical Engineering
Document Type:	Thesis
Advisory Committee:	Hanesian, Deran (Committee chair) Perna, Angelo J. (Committee member) Schuring, John R. (Committee member)
Date:	1999-01
Keywords:	In situ remediation. Volatile organic compounds --Environmental aspects. Chemical processes.
Availability:	Unrestricted
Abstract:	Remediation of sites contaminated with hazardous wastes could be an expensive endeavor. There is, therefore, the need to explore techniques, which can reduce the remediation time and achieve regulatory specifications, thus reducing the cost involved in a site remediation exercise. In this work, we investigated the use of sonic energy to enhance the in situ removal rate of trichloroethylene and dichloroethylene from a site in Hillsborough Township. New Jersey. The experiments were performed with and without sonic energy and each time the concentration of the trichloroethylene swept out from the site and the flowrate of the effluent gas were measured. The results obtained indicate that when sonic energy is used as an enhancement technique the removal rate of trichloroethylene increases by an average value of about 37.9 % and the concentration of trichloroethylene in the effluent stream increases by an average value of about 20.8 %. These results mean that sonic energy, when used as an enhancement technique, will reduce the remediation time and can help achieve regulatory specifications in a site clean-up exercise after coventional Vapor Extraction methods have reached assymptotic values. It is recommended that further work be done to find the attenuation coefficients of the sonic field and also to determine the decay rate of the sonic intensity at this site.