Drucker, an environmental engineer at Port Hueneme's Naval Facilities Engineering Service Center, created the system that improves on old technology.

Adjustable Depth Air Sparging, or ADAS, is being tested at a polluted site in New Jersey, where it has performed well against traditional technology.

Air sparging is a technique used to separate contaminants, such as those found in petroleum products, from groundwater. A well of about 1- to 2.5-inches in diameter is drilled and then air is forced down a pipe to the bottom of the well. The air goes into the ground and bubbles up through the groundwater, stripping away pollutants.

The pollutants rise with the air toward the surface where other techniques are used to collect and dispose of them.

The problem with this approach is there is a risk of not hitting the "sweet spot" — the depth where the air will strip out the most pollutants in the smallest amount of time, Drucker said.

"That's why you take your chances when it's set at a particular depth," he said.

Various approaches have been tried to get optimal results. Companies drill a well, pump in air through a pipe and then bring in equipment to adjust the depth. That can be expensive and time consuming.

Some in the industry have proposed drilling several wells at different depths near each other, but that also is expensive.

When he heard that suggestion at a conference on air injection, Drucker started thinking about a new solution.

Three months later, he had sketched out an idea for how to adjust the depth of the well, while making it faster and cheaper than previous methods.

ADAS was born.

Big savings

Drucker's invention consists of a half-inch pipe perforated with holes that is inserted into a 1-inch diameter well. A rubber sleeve covers the length of the pipe. As the air is pushed down the pipe, it inflates the sleeve like a balloon, which expands and seals off the well. The air coming out the bottom is forced into the surrounding rock.

When the depth needs to be adjusted, the air is shut off, the sleeve deflates and the pipe can be moved deeper. Different pieces of pipe can be screwed together or taken apart to create the necessary length.

The technology will probably cost about $1,000 more than a typical air sparging system, Drucker said, but the savings in operational costs make up for it.

Drucker said the cost for an air sparging well can run from $10,000s to $100,000s.

"Where you realize the savings is very conditional from site to site," he said.

ADAS could save more than $10,000 over more traditional methods because it is easier to adjust the depth without expensive equipment. But the biggest savings could come from meeting project cleanup deadlines.

Drucker said an important part of having the adjustable-depth system is that it speeds up the process and makes it easier to find that "sweet spot." Moving a project along more quickly has huge implications, since a cleanup project that doesn't meet its goals in time is often closed off and allowed to naturally work out the pollutants, which takes much more time and monitoring.

At larger sites, that extended commitment can run costs into the millions.

Air sparging is a proven technology in the cleanup industry, which gave Drucker's creation some built-in validity from the start.

"Any time you can improve upon a good or proven technology, it's a good thing," he said. It means you don't have to spend a lot of time convincing people of the basic premise behind the technology or showing them how it would work.

But you do need to show it provides some advantage over existing approaches.

Partnership with the Navy

Once Drucker created the device, the next step was testing it in the field. That's where the Navy's efforts to share technology with the private sector came in.

Government scientists are required to share some things developed by the government with private enterprise. Velcro and the Internet are examples of products that have made their way from government labs to mainstream use.

"Andrew conceptualized the technology, and we found licensees for it," said Kurt Buehler, who manages the Naval Facilities Engineering Service Center's environmental quality technology transfer program.

Drucker and the Navy each get a percentage of the annual fee from the license, Buehler said.

Sharing such information can take many forms, including patents and licenses, cooperative development agreements and small business innovative research funding.

"They each have their niche in helping to move that technology to the private sector," Buehler said.

In the case of the ADAS, the sharing came through a partnership with Xpert Design and Diagnostics, or XDD, located in Stratham, N.H. Drucker knows Mike Marley, one of the XDD founders.

The company was working on a Superfund site in New Jersey. It turned out to be an ideal location to test ADAS. Superfund sites were established in 1981 by a government program that identified 114 top-priority hazardous waste sites for cleanup.

The New Jersey site was contaminated with several toxic solvents.

The TechLink Center, which is funded by the Department of Defense, works to bring companies together with federal laboratories. It worked out a licensing partnership between XDD and the Naval Facilities Engineering Service Center.

"There is a huge number of patents coming out of research being done by the Department of Defense," said Marti Elder, senior technology manager with TechLink. "The real value of a patent doesn't get unlocked until it gets commercialized."

The ADAS partnership licenses the technology to XDD for five years and creates a co-operative research and development agreement.

The Center for Commercialization of Advanced Technology, also supported by the Defense Department, provided $10,000 for the first test at the New Jersey site. CCAT seeks technology from government labs, small entrepreneurs and academic researchers that has commercial potential.

Drucker said the Superfund site was a great place to test the system, especially since air sparging already was being used to clean up parts of the site — which provided something with which to compare the performance of the adjustable-depth system.

"All we had to do was hook up the system," he said.

Moving toward the market

The testing already has paid off in a few adjustments that have improved the system.

One problem was that sediment was getting sucked out of the well and into the pipe when the air stopped flowing. XDD suggested putting a screen around the pipe to keep the sediment out and creating a valve to prevent the vacuum created when the air flow stopped.

The test results have been equally encouraging.

Because the operators were able to move the air sparging system to different depths easily, the removal rates improved.

"We could tell that by moving the adjustable sparging system up and down within the well, that mass removal rates improved due to that flexibility," XDD's Marley said in a written statement. "That site and any other sites may have more difficulty reaching its remediation goals without that adjustable feature."

TechLink is working on finding a manufacturer to license the device. That search is strengthened because there are environmental cleanup companies that already are interested in using the technology, Elder said.

As a new product, it's still high-risk, but the results of the field trial show that it works as well as hoped, she said.

"This one's got good potential," Elder said. "It's like, ‘Why didn't we do this before?'"

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Photo caption:

Environmental engineer Andrew Drucker displays his Adjustable Depth Air Sparging system, which may soon be on the market. Chuck Kirman / Star staff photo