Experimental setup for the study of soil vapor extraction: a practical approach to determine sorption effect

Soil Vapor Extraction is one of the most used in situ technologies for the removal of volatile contaminants from the vadose zone. Development of mathematical models and validation with field results has improved the understanding of processes occurring during remediation. One of the most important is the transport of the contaminants from the different phases present in the soil to the gaseous one which is governed by thermodynamic and kinetic laws. In this work, the analysis of the response curves to Dirac pulses in soil columns for the determination of both the thermodynamic and kinetic parameters is considered. Results obtained for sand columns with typical gasoline and solvent compounds are presented. This analytical technique does not require long periods of time, is sensitive to relatively low partition coefficients, and reproduces closely the actual soil conditions so any kinetic limitations that may appear during operation should be observable in these experiments.