Experimentally Measured Interfacial Area during Gas Injection into Saturated Porous Media: An Air Sparging Analogy

The amount of interfacial area (awn) between air and subsurface liquids during air-sparging can limit the rate of site remediation. Lateral movement within porous media could be encountered during air-sparging operations when air moves along the bottom of a low-permeability lens. This study was conducted to directly measure the amount of awn between air and water flowing within a bench-scale porous flow cell during the lateral movement of air along the upper edge of the cell during air injections into an initially water-saturated flow cell. Four different cell orientations were used to evaluate the effect of air injection rates and porous media geometries on the amount of awn between fluids. Air was injected at flow rates that varied by three orders of magnitude, and for each flow cellover this range of injection rates little change in awn was noted. A wider variation in awn was observed when air moved through different regions for the different flow cell orientations. These results are in good agreement with the experimental findings of Waduge et al. (2007), who performed experiments in a larger sand-pack flow cell, and determined that air-sparging efficiency is nearly independent of flow rate but highly dependent on the porous structure. By directly measuring the awn, and showing that awn does not vary greatly with changes in injection rate, we show that the lack of improvement to remediation rates is because there is a weak dependence of the awn on the air injection rate.