Pneumatic fracturing is an emerging tool to enhance the remediation efficiency of contaminated unsaturated zones by injecting high pressure air and inducing artificial fracture networks. Pneumatic fracturing is reported to be well suited for the cases where the contaminated unsaturated zone thickness is less than 5 m as many contaminated domestic sites in Korea. Nevertheless, there have been almost no studies carried out on the site-specific efficiency and the optimized design of pneumatic fracturing considering the unsaturated zone characteristics of Korea. In this study, we employ numerical simulations to compare the efficiency of pneumatic fracturing on the aspect of the site remediation and the porosity improvement at several hypothetic unsaturated zones composed of four typical soil types. According to the simulation results, it is found that the zone with fine grains soil such as clay and silt shows better efficiency than the zone composed of coarse grains in terms of air flow and porosity enhancements. The results imply that pneumatic fracturing may improve the efficiency of site reclamation by jointly or independently applied to the many contaminated sites in Korea.

Keywords: Pneumatic fracturing;Multiphase flow simulation;Unsaturated zone;Porosity improvement;