Thermal Treatment Short Course

In situ thermal treatment technologies have attracted the interest of owners and regulators of contaminated sites, especially in cases where expedited cleanup is desired or where subsurface heterogeneities are likely to limit the performance of other in situ treatment alternatives. These technologies include electrical resistance heating (ERH), conductive heating/in situ thermal desorption (ISTD), steam enhanced extraction (SEE), radio frequency heating (RFH), and large-diameter auger (LDA) soil mixing combined with steam/hot air injection. There has been, however, a general lack of information on the costs and performance of the various approaches, making them difficult to implement.

To help practitioners realize the potential of thermal treatment technologies, a short course covering lessons learned was presented in December 2011 at the SERDP and ESTCP Symposium. An on-demand video of the short course summarizes the results from several recent research and demonstration projects focused on improving the technology and understanding its performance, especially for difficult sites such as those with dense non-aqueous phase liquid (DNAPL) contamination in fractured bedrock. The short course covered the state of the art and recent advances in the fundamental understanding of thermal technologies and also highlighted recent field-scale demonstrations. In addition, the course discussed combined remedy approaches such as using enhanced bioremediation to remove residual contamination and address remediation goals.

Individual modules of the short course can be accessed below. In addition, the material is available in its entirety in PDF format.