For environmental remediation of hazardous material, conventional excavation equipment can be slow and harmful. AIR-SPADE’s supersonic air jet and pneumatic vacuum transport technology makes environmental site remediation easy, fast, non-damaging, and:

• Is able to uncover buried waste containers without fear of puncture
• Contains the soil material as it is excavated to prevent air borne contamination
• Can be made to continuously separate the spoil in stages so that various elements can be selectively separated
• Can be combined with other processes to treat the spoil or waste in a continuous process
• Can achieve excavation rates comparable with much larger pieces of equipment
• May be combined with robot manipulators to dig in ways that conventional backhoes or excavators cannot
• Removes material in carefully controlled layers
• May be remotely controlled to remove the operator from the immediate vicinity of the contamination

Savannah River

In the late 90's, AIR-SPADE was asked by Savannah River DOE Site to perform a test to see if AIR-SPADE's Soft Trencher technology could excavate buried drums. A box was constructed that contained a number of 55 gallon drum that were covered with compacted dirt. The AIR-SPADE Soft Trencher was successful in uncovering the drum tops without damaging them and was much faster than digging by hand.

To watch a video from the excavation click here

Soil Sampling and Monitoring

The AIR-SPADE^® and the AIR-VAC can be used together for pot holing for environmental monitoring. Microseeps, a Pittsburgh based corporation, uses our equipment to dig test holes for installing sampling wells in gas stations. According to Frank Phillips, the AIR-SPADE^® and the AIR-VAC have greatly improved their ability to dig holes in a cost effective manner and with much less human stress in the process. Left click to enlarge images. To see video of this work, please click here for the reference library.

Typical hole dug for monitoring well		Pot-holing
Sucking water from a catch basin