Abstract
Soil contamination with petroleum hydrocarbons has become one of the most serious problems due to its negative repercussion on ecosystems. For this reason, different analytical techniques have been developed to evaluate the quantity and the quality of organic pollutants using electrochemical techniques, and a geophysical methods have been developed which utilizes the contrast caused by the contaminant on physical properties of the soil dielectric methods shows high potential for characterization kerosene contaminated soil and determination of the level of contaminant. The potential of dielectric measuring techniques for soil characterization has not been fully explored. For this purpose, dielectric measurements, in the frequency range from 100 kHz to 1000 kHz, were carried out in sandy soil samples, contaminated with solutions of kerosene, at different concentrations. The differences of the dielectric behavior with contaminant content suggest that the monitoring of complex dielectric constant has the potential to quantify contaminants.