Engineering scaleup of electrical soil heating for soil decontamination

The objective of PNL's efforts in electrically based methods for environmental restoration is to provide new and cost-effective means for removing hazardous organic contaminants from soils, and to detoxify those contaminants after they are removed. Recent work has concentrated on two areas: electrical soil heating to remove volatile and semivolatile compounds from soils, and in situ oxidation via a form of low-temperature plasma to decompose nonvolatile and bound contaminants. This paper covers only the electrical soil heating component, and describes recent efforts to model the heating process to enable equipment and energy requirements to be specified. An initial field test of the heating process suggests that the model presented in this paper is correct, within the range of uncertainty in the spatial variations of soil properties. Because of page limitations, a description of this test and discussion of the test results will be relegated to a subsequent publication.