CREATING AND EXPLICITLY CHARACTERIZING HETEROGENEITY AND NAPL MACRO-SCALE ENTRAPMENT AT THE INTERMEDIATE SCALE

摘要

The pervasive use of non-aqueous phase liquid (NAPL) has inevitably lead to a considerable number of sites contaminated by NAPLs. Unfortunately, there has been only limited work assessing the behavior of NAPLs for heterogeneous field sites and laboratory experiments. These investigations were forced to deal with different scales of heterogeneity and a more limited heterogeneous system, respectively. However, such work has illustrated the preference of NAPL for certain materials and the propensity for NAPL to be distributed almost exclusively in such materials, at high levels of saturation. This work presents a series of intermediate-scale laboratory experiments that recreate aspects of a field-site dense-NAPL (DNAPL) spill to examine the propensity for distribution and saturation under controlled conditions.