• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.67-77
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• 2013

To improve the energy efficiency of conventional thermal treatment, soil remediation with microwave has been studied. In this study, the remediation efficiency of contaminated soil with semi-volatile organic contaminants were evaluated with microwave oven and several additives such as water, formic acid, iron powder, sodium hydroxide (NaOH) solution, and activated carbon. For the experiment, loamy sand and sandy loam collected from Imjin river flood plain were intentionally contaminated with hexachlorobenzene and phenanthrene, respectively. The contaminated soils were treated with microwave facility and the mass removals of organic contaminants from soils were evaluated. Among additives that were added to increase the remediation efficiency, activated carbon and NaOH solution were more effective than water, iron powder, and formic acid. When 10 g of hexachlorobenzene (142.4 mg/kg-soil) or phenanthrene (2,138.8 mg/kg-soil) contaminated soil that mixed with 0.5 g iron powder, 0.5 g activated carbon and 1 ml 6.25 M NaOH solution were treated with microwave for 3 minutes, more than 95% of contaminants were removed. The degradation of hexachlorobenzene during microwave treatments with additives was confirmed by the detection of pentachlorobenzene and tetrachlorobenzene. Naphthalene and phenol were also detected as degradation products of phenanthrene during microwave treatment with additives. The results showed that adding a suitable amount of additives for microwave treatments fairly increased the efficiency of removing semi-volatile soil organic contaminants.

• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.6-12
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• 2005

Contamination of soils and groundwater by leakage of petroleum compounds from underground storage tanks (USTs) has become great environmental issues. Conventional methods such as soil vapor extraction (SVE) used for the remediation of unsaturated soils contaminated with volatile organic compounds might not be applied for the removal of semi-volatile organic compounds such as diesel fuels and PCBs, which have low volatility and high hydrophobicity. The objective of this study is to develop a hot air injection method to remove semi-volatile compounds. Additionally, operation parameters such as temperature, air flow rate, and water content are evaluated. Experimental results show that diesel ranged organics (DROs) are removed in the order of volatility of organic compounds. As expected, removal efficiency of organics is highly dependent on the temperature. It is considered that more than $90\%$ of organic contaminants whose carbon numbers range between 17 and 22 can be removed efficiently by the hot air injection-extraction method (modified SVE) over the $100^{\circ}C$. It is also found that increased air flow rate resulted in high removal rate of contaminants. However, air flow rate over 40 cc/min is not effective for the operation aspects, due to mass transfer limitation on the volatilization rate of the contaminants. The effect of the water content on the decane removal is minimal, but some components show large dependence on the removal efficiency with increasing water content.