[1] Steam injection has been efficiently applied in many cases for the remediation of contamination in the unsaturated zone; however, some effort still has to be made to establish this technology in remediation practices for contamination in the saturated zone. The main difficulty here is the lack of reliable methods capable of predicting steam propagation around the injection well in poorly layered aquifers in an early screening stage. In this paper, methods are presented for predicting steam propagation in saturated media. First, a subset of experiments conducted in a two-dimensional flume is utilized to demonstrate the characteristics of steam propagation in water-saturated porous media. An improved numerical model concept that for the first time accounts for the variable degrees of freedom in the researched system is successfully tested and compared with an experimental data set. The model is consequently used to derive a set of type curves for the characteristic steam propagation in saturated porous media. These type curves can be used to estimate the steam propagation and the efficiency of a measure. Finally, the applicability and the potential of the developed methods are demonstrated for a pilot-scale remediation.
The Savannah River Site (SRS) is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) facility that was set aside in the early 1950s as a controlled area for the production of nuclear materials. The disposal of used chlorinated solvents in the M-Area of SRS to an unlined settling basin and to a nearby tributary, along with spills at the solvent storage tank area, has created a significant subsurface contamination problem. SRS is located in west-central South Carolina, where the geology is dominated by sediments of the Coastal Plain physiographic province. The sediments are relatively flat-lying, irregular, interbedded sand and clay bodies deposited in marine to fluvio-deltaic environments. In 2000, a pilot field-scale steam flood began at a former solvent storage tank area (321 M SST) to demonstrate the proficiency of steam flooding in the geologic environment at SRS and to determine the feasibility of the process for the remediation of the M-Area settling basin. A multiphase flow numerical simulator was used to predict heating patterns of the steam flood at the solvent storage tank area. Although the simulations were not used to design the pilot test, comparisons of data from the actual steam flood with the simulation confirm the model's ability to predict steam front propagation in the heterogeneous media. The overall heating patterns are dominated by convective heat flows at early times, but thermal conduction appears to play a large role at longer times, dampening the effects of heterogeneities.
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