Evaluation of Model Concepts to Describe Water Transport in Shallow Subsurface Soil and Across the Soil–Air Interface

Influence mechanism of thermally enhanced phase change on heat transfer and soil vapour extraction

Thermal enhanced soil vapour extraction (T-SVE) is a remedial technique involving gas, aqueous, solid and nonaqueous phases along with mass and heat transfer. Interphase mass transfer of contaminants and water evaporation/condensation will cause the redistribution of phase saturation, eventually affecting the performance of T-SVE. In this study, a multiphase, multicompositional and nonisothermal model was developed to simulate the T-SVE treatment of contaminated soil. The model was calibrated using published data from the SVE laboratory and T-SVE field experiments. The temporal and spatial distributions of the contaminant concentrations in the four different phases, the mass transfer rates and the temperatures are presented to reveal the coupling interactions that occur between multiple fields during T-SVE. A series of parametric studies were carried out to investigate the effect of water evaporation and adsorbed/dissolved contaminants on the T-SVE performance. It was found that endothermic evaporation, exothermic condensation and the interaction between different removal paths of a contaminant played critical roles in the thermal enhancement of SVE. Ignoring them can result in significant differences in the removal efficiency values.

Revisiting Salvucci’s Semi-analytical Solution for Bare Soil Evaporation with New Consideration of Vapour Diffusion and Film Flow

Bare soil evaporation is controlled by a combination of capillary flow, vapour diffusion and film flow. Relevant analytical solutions mostly assume horizontal flow conditions and ignore gravitational effects. Salvucci (1997) provided a rare example of a semi-analytical solution for vertical bare soil evaporation. However, they did not explicitly represent vapour diffusion and film flow, which are likely to account for a significant proportion of total flow during vertical evaporation from soils. Vapour diffusion and film flow can be incorporated via Salvucci’s desorptivity parameter, which represents the proportionality constant relating Stage 2 cumulative evaporation to the square root of time under horizontal flow conditions. The objective of this article is to implement vapour diffusion and film flow within Salvucci’s semi-analytical solution and test its performance by comparison with isothermal numerical simulation and relevant experimental data. The following important conclusions are drawn. Analytical solutions that assume horizontal flow conditions are inadequate for understanding vertical evaporation problems because they overestimate evaporation rates and mostly predict vapour diffusion and film flow to be of negligible influence. Salvucci’s semi-analytical solution is effective at predicting the order-of-magnitude reduction in evaporation caused by gravitational effects. However, it is unable to identify the correct importance of vapour diffusion and film flow because these processes can only be represented through its desorptivity parameter.

Coupling between internal and external mass transfer during stage-1 evaporation in capillary porous media: Interfacial resistance approach

The coupling boundary condition to be imposed at the evaporative surface of a porous medium is studied from pore network simulations considering the capillary regime. This paper highlights the formation of a thin edge effect region of smaller saturation along the evaporative surface. It is shown that this thin region forms in the breakthrough period at the very beginning of the drying process. The size of this region is studied and shown to be not network size dependent. This region is shown to be the locus of a nonlocal equilibrium effect. The features lead to the consideration of a coupling boundary condition involving an interfacial mass transfer resistance and an external mass transfer resistance. Contrary to previous considerations, it is shown that both resistances depend on the variation of the saturation, i.e., the fluid topology, and the size of the external mass transfer layer, i.e., the mass transfer rate. This is explained by the evolution of the vapor partial pressure distribution at the surface which becomes increasingly heterogeneous during evaporation and depends on both the evolving fluid distribution in the interfacial region and the mass transfer rate. However, the geometric effects due to the configuration of the fluids can be separated from rate effects that arise due to the nonequilibrium mass transport.