Soil Clean Up byin-situAeration. XII. Effect of Departures from Darcy's Law on Soil Vapor Extraction

Abstract
Data are presented which indicate that soil vapor extraction (SVE) wells are commonly operated at gas flow rates which are sufficiently high that Darcy's law is not applicable. At Reynolds numbers of the order of 1 or larger, inertial forces as well as viscous forces must be taken into account. This leads to an expression for the wellhead vacuum which is a quadratic function of the molar gas flow rate of the well. Data sets from four wells are examined and found to be in excellent agreement with this quadratic dependence. Equations are given for the scale-up of test data to full-scale SVE wells.