Resources & Systems International, Inc.
Watershed Planning • Resources Management • Environmental Solutions • Ecological Risk Assessment

BioSVE BioSVE incorporates soil vapor extraction, vacuum enhanced recovery and biodegradation into one easy to use model. Quite often, field situations require screening tools to simulate different remediation schemes prior to implementation. While these screening tools usually require extensive site data (which can be very expensive or impossible to collect in the available time frame), BioSVE allows site evaluation with few sampling events, quickly. Vacuum Enhanced Recovery (bioslurping), coupled with biodegradation, is a popular emerging technology for unsaturated zone cleanup, and BioSVE takes advantage of this industry trend with useful tools for hydrocarbon contaminant sites. A typical hydrocarbon spill/leak may contain from 20 to more than 100 components, and BioSVE can model recovery and degradation of up to 250 components. BioSVE allows for modeling of contaminants partitioned among water, vapor, free hydrocarbon and solid phases. This gives the user power to develop remediation strategies for free product recovery, soil vacuum extraction, natural or engineered biodegradation, etc. with high confidence and lower costs to total remediation efforts. BioSVE from Resources & Systems International, Inc., allows: Screening for soil vacuum extraction (SVE), biodegradation, and vacuum enhanced recovery (VER). Soil vacuum extraction of up to 250 species from the hydrocarbon contaminated unsaturated zone. Based on the assumption of chemical equilibrium, species are partitioned among water, oil, gas, and solid phases. Recovery of species in various phases versus time, and the species total mass versus time can be plotted by BioSVE's resident graphing package. Non-equilibrium phase partitioning effect is incorporated via a venting efficiency factor. Simulation of oxygen-limited biodegradation based on the assumption of an instantaneous reaction between the hydrocarbon species and oxygen. Kinetics effects are handled using a bio-efficiency factor. User defined free product recovery rate (R) at time t as: R = AMt D where A and D are parameters obtained from field calibration, and M0 is the initial free hydrocarbon mass at time t. This function has been incorporated in the chemical equilibrium model to simulate recovery of free floating product along with bioventing of the unsaturated zone. Investigation of the effects of gas pumping rates and temperature on cleanup time. Typical physicochemical properties data files for fresh and weathered gasoline are provided. The user can quickly edit copies of these files to accurately represent composition of the spill at the site. Less than one minute simulation times for most simulations on a 486 computer.