Influence of water on the supercritical fluid extraction of naphthalene from soil.

Supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) is an innovative soil remediation technology. To aid system evaluation and design, thermodynamic and kinetic parameters have been measured using a naphthalene contaminated, loamy sand at various water contents. The experimental results show that supercritical carbon dioxide can easily extract naphthalene from soil when the water content is below 10%. At low water contents, mass transfer is rapid and the equilibrium partition coefficient is independent of the soil's water content. However, the overall mass transfer coefficient, (kova), decreases by at least a factor of 200 as the water content increases from 10 to 20%.