Ultrasonic Application in Contaminated Soil Remediation

Abstract Ultrasonic remediation is an emerging technology that is applied to recover contaminated soils. There are 2 (two) main mechanisms that occur in the ultrasonic process: desorption and chemical degradation. Soil particle size, temperature, ultrasonic power, ultrasonic frequency, ultrasonic intensity and ultrasonic time are some factors found to affect the performance of ultrasonic remediation. Some studies showed that ultrasonic could be placed as a pre-treatment process and integrated with other remediation technology in order to improve the removal efficiency. Although the study related to ultrasonic remediation is limited, ultrasonic was found to work both for organic and inorganic contaminants, especially heavy metals or petroleum hydrocarbon contaminated soil as shown by some studies.