ABSORBER FLUTe™

Absorber Collection of Pore Fluids is Now Practical with the FLUTe™ Liner

The everting, air-driven liner can emplace absorbent materials of many kinds against the borehole wall in the vadose zone. The pressurized liner pushes the absorbent material against the hole wall and also isolates the absorber and the medium from any other effects. The liner plugs the hole preventing flow in the hole while the absorber comes into capillary tension equilibrium with the pore liquids in the medium. Once the absorber has equilibrated with the medium, the liner is removed by inversion, carrying the absorber to the surface without contact with the hole wall at any other location. During recovery, the absorber is isolated inside the inverted liner material, so that the absorbed fluids are contained in the absorber without loss of even the volatiles. Absorbers vary from patches of felted material to complete absorbent coverings of the liner.

A wide variety of absorbers have been characterized for use with the liner installation. Typical applications of the absorbent collectors have been in the mapping of tritium migration and in collection of water samples containing VOCs. Sixty absorbers were emplaced in a 300 ft. hole at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Other absorbers were installed in horizontal holes beneath radioactive waste landfills to collect liquid samples while pore gas samples were collected at the same time through tubing incorporated in the liner per the typical gas sampling design of a FLUTe system. A paper by C. Keller and B. Travis in publications describes the absorbent collection process.

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