Horizontal and Vertical Well Comparison for In Situ Air Sparging |
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| Authors: | Charles R Plummer James D Nelson Gary S Zumwalt |
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| Institution: | Charles R. Plummer holds a B.S. in civil engineering and an M.S. in environmental engineering and water resources from Louisiana Tech University. Plummer is employed by Perry, Pyron &McCown Consultants Inc. in Monroe, Louisiana (2.508 Ticheli Rd., Monroe, LA 71202), where he is responsible for remediation systems design and analysis and environmental application research. Before entering Louisiana Tech in 1989, Plummer served eight years as a drilling supervisor for an oil and gas exploration company. After receiving his B.S. degree in 1993, he worked as a graduate assistant for the Trenchless Technology Center under the guidance of Dr. Tom Iseley and Dr. James Nelson.;James D. Nelson is associate dean for academic affairs, College of Engineering, and professor of civil engineering at Louisiana Tech University (Dept. of Civil Engineering, LTV, Ruston, LA 71270). He received his Ph.D. from Colorado State University, and his research interests are in ground water model-ing and remediation.;Gary S. Zumwalt is associate professor of geosciences at Louisiana Tech University (Dept. of Geosciences, LTU, Ruston, LA 71270). He received his Ph.D. from the University of California-Davis, and his research interests are environmental geology and ground water remediation. |
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| Abstract: | A laboratory study was conducted to determine the effectiveness ol vertical and horizontal well configurations for ground water remediation using in situ air sparging. A lexan lank was designed and constructed to allow both the visualization of air flow and quantitative measurement of the distribution of air flow. Two media, sand and glass beads. were tested with both Vertical and horizontal air sources. In each case, most of the air traveled through preferential channels as continuous flow rather than as discrete bubbles as reported in other studies. Liven though glass beads were selected to have the same grain-size distribution as the sand, air flow was quite different through the two media. Results show that glass beads are not a suitable material for modeling air flow through natural sediments. In this study, the horizontal well proved to be more effective than the vertical well by impacting more of the media with a uniform distribution of air throughout the media. The vertical well resulted in a nonuniform distribution of air flow with most of the air concentrated directly above the well. |
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