NJIT eTD: The New Jersey Institute of Technology's electronic Theses & Dissertations
Title:
Analysis and modeling of ultrasound enhanced soil washing process
Author:
Rajaratnam, Kamalavathany
Document Type:
Thesis
Department:
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Degree:
Master of Science
Major:
Civil Engineering
Advisory Committee:
Meegoda, Jay N.
Bhattacharjee, Manish Chandra
Raghu, Dorairaja
Thesis Date:
1997
Keywords:
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons--Decontamination
Ultrasonic cleaning
Surface active agents
Availability:
Unrestricted
Abstract:

In this research, statistical analysis of data from ultrasound enhanced soil washing process was performed. The process was optimized using a statistical model. The model had four factors namely power, solvent:soil, surfactant, and dwell time as process variables. The percentage of removal efficiency was considered as the dependent variable. The results from two full and one partial factorial designs were analysed. Interactions up to third order were considered in the analysis, but the results from full factorial design showed that those of order higher than second had insignificant contributions to the removal of contaminants. Since the higher order interactions of process variables could be neglected, a quadratic model was used to optimize the process conditions. The analysis showed that the ultrasonic power density was the main contributing factor. The analysis results showed that for soil #1, optimum average removal of 83 % was obtained at 32% power, 42 solvent:soil, 0.69% surfactant con., and for a dwell time of 25.5 min. For soil #2, similar results were obtained with lower removal efficiency. The removal efficiency of individual PAHs produce similar conclusions for both soils. A partial factorial design was considered for soil 93 to drastically reduce the number of experiments. The statistical analysis showed that data for partial factorial design can be used to obtain meaningful results and had an optimal removal of 37.67% at 34.24% power, 32.62 solvent:soil, 0.89% surfactant con., and for dwell time of 11.33 min.

Complete Thesis:
njit-etd1997-012 (148 pages ~ 10,271 KB pdf)
Download by Chapters:
Front Matter (Title Page, Abstract, Table of Contents, etc. ~ 21pages ~ 1,078 KB pdf)
Chapter 1: Introduction (3 pages ~ 196 KB pdf)
Chapter 2: Literature Review (9 pages ~ 766 KB pdf)
Chapter 4: Experimental Design (16 pages ~ 1,098 KB pdf)
Chapter 5: Analytical Procedure (4 pages ~ 232 KB pdf)
Chapter 8: Summary And Conclusions (5 pages ~ 286 KB pdf)
References (3 pages ~ 233 KB pdf)
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