Improving the Sweeping Efficiency of Amendment by Using Polymer

Abstract

Effective delivery of remedial amendment to the subsurface contamination zone is a challenge when the source zone is either in an aquifer or in a vadose zone. Polymer solutions are shear thinning fluids which can be used as delivery media to improve the distribution of remedial amendments injected into heterogeneous subsurface environments by increasing the viscosity and decreasing the velocity of the flooding solution. In this study, combinations of polymer (xanthan) and common remediation agent (potassium permanganate) were used for sweep efficiency-enhanced. This study utilized 2-D flow-tank experiments to examine the SE used by xanthan with KMnO4. Two different experimental models (Multi-layer and Surrounding models) were studied. They simulated the different flushing mode. The results showed that SE improved 13.5% and 21.3% for model 1 and model 2, respectively. Moreover, the lower concentration (500 mg/L) is the best choice in our experiment. Our work found that some advantages such as high viscosity retention, moderate remediation agent demand make xanthan/remediation agent become the most compatible for polymer-enhanced sweep efficiency. This will be used further experiments.