Development of a correlation for aqueous-vapor phase mass transfer in porous media

In many situations vapor-phase extraction procedures (e.g., soil venting, air sparging, and bioventing) may be suitable methods for remediating porous media contaminated by volatile organic compounds. This has led to increased study of operative processes in these systems, including aqueous-vapor phase mass transfer. Past work has shown the importance of the flow regime on this process, but a quantitative estimate of mass-transfer coefficients is lacking, especially for systems not confounded by uncertainties involving interfacial area between the phases. An experimental investigation was conducted to isolate the resistance to aqueous-vapor phase mass transfer at the phase boundary, using an ideal porous medium system. Mass-transfer coefficients were measured for toluene for a wide range of Reynolds numbers. An empirical model was fit to the data in dimensionless form. The mass-transfer model was coupled with an available interfacial area model, yielding a dimensionless expression for the mass-transfer rate coefficient. This expression was used to compare results from this work to three other experimental studies reported in the literature. These comparisons showed that for experiments where infiltrating water flowed uniformly within the porous medium, the predicted mass-transfer coefficients were within a factor of 5 of the measured coefficients. Mass transfer was significantly slower than the rate predicted, using the results from this work, in experiments where infiltrating water flowed nonuniformly.