LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS ON AIR MIGRATION IN SATURATED POROUS MEDIUM

Air sparging coupled with soil vapor extraction has been developed and applied to remove volatile contaminants from subsurface environment instead of groundwater extraction coupled with soil vapor extraction. In this paper, laboratory experiments, using 1mm glass beads as the porous medium, were conducted to examine air sparging performance. The purpose of these experiments was to observe the basic mechanisms of injected air and water flows in saturated porous medium during air sparging. The results obtained in this study were the following. The continuous air channels formed inside the porous medium when the grain size of the medium was 1 mm. The pulsed operation for air injection spread the region of injected air flow more than in the continuous operation. Water in the medium gradually moved outside the air flow region by pulsed operation.