Applying automated data acquisition and management technology to bioremediation

Operating a bioremediation process requires timely and accurate analysis of physical and chemical parameters that can affect the system. At a fuel oil spill site, the operation of an in-situ bioremediation system, consisting of fluid and nutrient injection, fluid withdrawal, and aeration cycles, is monitored by means of electronic downhole sensors and on-site chemical analysis. A data acquisition and management system was designed and implemented to rapidly analyze data for operational decision malting. A hardware suite, containing an electronic monitoring system data acquisition computer, and data analysis workstation, was also developed. Through the use of both commercial software products and custom software, suites of data management and analysis tools were provided. The data acquisition suite of software tools assisted in programming dataloggers, automatically recording monitored data, and integrating these data with manually sampled chemical data. The data analysis suite of software tools assisted in downloading data to remote workstations, sampling the database for trend analysis, and automating the interface to commercial analysis packages.