The paper presents basic principles of RF heating and describes its possible applications for oil extraction and soil remediation, based on the experience obtained by several years of work at Consorzio Polo Tecnologico Magona (CPTM). Activities include a complete approach, which goes through the steps of problem formulation, modeling, and experimentation. It is shown that RF heating can represe...

Last-instar larvae of the western cherry fruit fly, Rhagoletis indifferens, were subjected to Beauveria bassiana GHA incorporated into sterile sand and non-sterile orchard soil. Mycosis in the pupal stage was observed in >20% of buried R. indifferens pupae and >80% of larvae entering sand treated with either of two B. bassiana isolates. When pre-pupal larvae burrowed into conidium-treated non-s...

[1] In the past, texture-based classification of soils has been used for grouping soils in variably saturated water flow and solute transport studies. Classification of soils becomes especially important for large-scale studies where the spatial and temporal variability in the hydraulic properties of soils exceeds the field sampling capabilities. Although soiltexture-based classification has be...

The incorporation of biochar into soils has been proposed as a means to sequester carbon from the atmosphere. An added environmental benefit is that biochar has been shown to increase soil retention of agrochemicals, and recent research has indicated that biochar may be effective in increasing soil retention of bacteria. In this study we investigate the transport behavior of Escherichia coli O1...

In a multi-step outflow experiment we found that a weak heterogeneity within a sand column prevents the estimated effective hydraulic parameters from being unique. We compared vertical water content profiles calculated from these parameters with profiles measured by x-ray attenuation. A layered material model based on x-ray data was able to reproduce the outflow curve and also the water content...

animals that breed in ground holes can be exposed to higher doses of radiation from natural radioactive isotopes, including radon and its daughters, present in soil air. one of such species is the sand martin riparia riparia. examination of natural burrows in sand mines revealed radon levels of 2.82-1320 bq/m3 in the examined soil horizon where martins dug their burrows. it was shown that adult...

The radionuclide contents and their activity concentrations in beach sand, sediment and adjacent soil samples collected from Inani sea beach, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh were determined by using a high resolution germanium detector (HPGe) of 20% relative efficiency. A total of eighteen samples of three categories were collected and analysed. The activity concentrations of Ra, Th and K in the sand s...

Golan Bel and Yosef Ashkenazy Department of Environmental Physics, Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Sede Boqer Campus 84990, Israel (Dated: May 11, 2014) Abstract Psammophilous plants are special plants that flourish in sand moving environments. There are two main mechanisms by which the wind affects these plants: (i) sand drift exposes roots and cov...

This research provides an insight into the previously unexplored aspects of kinematic pile bending, especially for large-intensity earthquakes where soil behaviour is highly non-linear. In this study, a series dynamic centrifuge experiments was conducted on foundations embedded in two-layered profile to investigate effects during model earthquakes. A single and closely spaced 3 × 1 row group we...