Permeability Enhancement in Fine-Grained Sediments by Chemically Induced Clay Fabric Shrinkage

摘要

The National Research Council identified the entrapment of contaminants in fine-grained clay-bearing soils as a major impediment to the timely and cost-effective remediation of groundwater to regulatory standards. Contaminants trapped in low-permeability, low-diffusivity, high-sorptivity clays are not accessible to advective flushing by treatment fluids from permeable zones, and slowly diffuse out to recontaminate previously cleaned permeable strata. We propose to overcome this barrier to effective remediation by exploiting the ability of certain nontoxic EPA-approved chemicals (e.g., ethanol) to shrink and alter the fabric of clays, and thereby create macro-porosity and crack networks in fine-grained sediments. This would significantly reduce the distance and time scales of diffusive mass transport to advectively flushed boundaries, to yield orders of magnitude reduction in the time required to complete remediation.This project, funded as a 1-year feasibility study by LLNL's LDRD Program, is a multi-directorate, multi-disciplinary effort that leverages expertise from the Energy & Environment Directorate, the Environmental Restoration Division, and the Manufacturing & Materials Evaluation Division of Mechanical Engineering. In this feasibility study, a 'proof-of-principle' experiment was performed to answer the central question: 'Can clay shrinkage induced by ethanol in clay-bearing sediments overcome realistic confining stresses, crack clay, and increase its effective permeability by orders of magnitude within a time that is much smaller than the time required for diffusive mass transport of ethanol in the unaltered sediment.' To this end, we performed a crack propagation experiment under confining stress on an initially water-saturated bentonite clay layer that was exposed to pure ethanol on one surface and water on the other. We measured the rate of transport of ethanol across the clay layer and found that crack breakthrough across the clay layer was accompanied by a very large sudden increase in solvent flow through the layer.