Hydrocarbon penetration in multi-porosity soil

Abstract

Groundwater contamination is crucial, particularly due to hydrocarbon liquid leakages. Additionally, the vibration impact affects the migration of hydrocarbon through the subsurface soil to the groundwater surface which is causes by the dynamic stress that is imposed on the soils. Therefore, this paper presents the investigation and discussions on the penetration of Light Non-Aqueous Phase Liquid (LNAPL) in vibrated unsaturated double-porosity laterite soil with 30% moisture content. The apparatus used for this experiment are a vibrating table, acrylic soil column, mirror, LNAPL and a Nikon D90 digital camera. The LNAPL migration pattern in laterite soil was monitored and recorded using a digital image processing technique (DIPT) at certain time intervals. The images were processed using Surfer software and Matlab routine to plot the LNAPL hue-saturation-intensity (HSI) values. As a result, the migration rate of LNAPL decreased with the impact of vibration towards the soil due to the rearrangement and porosity of the soil structure and this was found to affect the speed of liquid penetration.