Engineered injection and extraction to enhance reaction for improved in situ remediation

During in situ remediation, a treatment solution is often injected into a contaminated aquifer to degrade the groundwater contaminant. Since contaminant degradation reactions occur only at locations where the treatment solution and groundwater contaminant overlap, mixing of the treatment solution and the contaminated groundwater is necessary for reaction to occur. Mixing results from molecular diffusion and pore-scale dispersion, which operate over small length scales; thus, mixing during in situ remediation can only occur where the separation distance between the treatment solution and contaminated groundwater is small. To promote mixing, advection can be used to spread the treatment solution into the contaminated groundwater to increase the extent of the region where the two solutions coexist. A certain degree of passive spreading is the natural consequence of aquifer heterogeneity, which is manifested as macrodispersion. An alternative mechanism is active spreading, in which unsteady flows lead to stretching and folding of plumes. Active spreading can be accomplished by engineered injection and extraction (EIE), in which clean water is injected and extracted at wells surrounding a contaminant plume to create unsteady flow fields that stretch and fold the treatment solution and contaminant plumes. For a model system in which nested plumes of two reactants undergo scalar transport and instantaneous reaction, the simulation results reported here indicate that EIE enhances degradation of groundwater contamination in homogeneous and heterogeneous aquifers compared to baseline models without EIE. Furthermore, this study shows that the amount of reaction provided by the spreading due to EIE is greater than the amount of reaction due to