Pilot Scale Feasibility Test of In-situ Soil Flushing by using 'Tween 80' Solution at Low Concentration for the Xylene Contaminated Site

This study was performed to identify the optimal operating conditions and to evaluate the xylene removal efficiency, applying in-situ soil flushing with the low concentrated solution of 'Tween 80' at the xylene contaminated site. The pilot scale test site ($5m{\times}5m{\times}3m$), was mainly composed of 'sandy loam', with the average hydraulic conductivity of $9.1{\times}10^{-4}cm\;s^{-1}$. The average xylene concentration of the site was 42.1 mg $kg^{-1}$, which was more than 2.5 times higher than Korea soil pollution warning limit (15 mg $kg^{-1}$). For the soil flushing, 7,800 L of 0.1~0.2% surfactant solution was injected into three injection wells at the average injection time of 9 hr $d^{-1}$ for 10 days, followed by the additional only groundwater injection of 6,000 L. The same amount of the effluent solution was extracted from three extraction wells. From the analysis for xylene concentration of all effluent at 3 extraction wells, total 166 g of xylene was removed by in-situ surfactant flushing. Even though the residual xylene concentrations of 7 soil sampling locations in the test site were different due to the soil heterogeneity, from the comparison of xylene concentration at 7 locations before/after the feasibility test, 53.9% of the initial xylene in the site was removed from three extraction wells (mainly Ext-N and Ext-M well). The results showed that the in-situ soil flushing by using low concentrated 'Tween 80' solution had a great potential to remediate the xylene contaminated site.