Shallow Ground Natural Gas Aeration Improvement

Project goal: To design and build a more efficient and cost-effective system for aerating natural gas from saturated soil.Underground natural gas leaks cause the surrounding soil to become saturated with gas. If a gas leak occurs at a facility owned by the sponsor or one of its customers, the sponsor can remove the natural gas safely with aeration equipment. The aeration ejector uses the Venturi effect to force compressed air through an inlet nozzle designed to choke the flow and cause a pressure drop, which draws the natural gas out of the ground and into the second-stage nozzle before it is ejected through the diffuser to the atmosphere. To ensure the new design improved the efficiency of the old design, the current system was modeled in SolidWorks and complex flow simulations were conducted. Pressure gauges were used on the current system to validate the accuracy of the simulations. Simulations of the new design were used to optimize the internal geometry. The new system will save time, money and energy because it extracts the natural gas more efficiently.