EAGER: Contaminant Transport Behavior in and at the Interface of Fine-Grained Sediments; Visualization, Simulation and Analysis

University Of Vermont & State Agricultural College, Burlington VT

Investigators

Abstract

1523488 Pinder Title: EAGER: Contaminant Transport Behavior in and at the Interface of Fine-Grained Sediments; Visualization, Simulation and Analysis EPA estimates that there are 235,000 to 355,000 contaminated groundwater sites across the United States that require remediation. The annual operation and maintenance costs, per site undergoing remediation, are estimated to range from $610,000 to $770,000. It is well known that contaminants behave differently in fine grained sediments and may lead to long term contamination of groundwater used as a source of drinking water. However, in spite of this high level of concern there is very little known about the behavior of contaminants that reside in these fine grained formations. It is therefore critical that the fundamental physical-chemical mechanisms responsible for contaminant behavior in fine-grained formations be thoroughly understood. The resulting analysis will elucidate the mechanisms that govern the long-term tailing phenomena observed in contaminated groundwater sites. Such contaminant tailing impacts industry financially, not only because of the direct costs, but also because of their requirement to hold money in reserve to assure long-term financial support for site remediation. The general public, government and industry seek to accelerate groundwater contamination cleanup and this research is designed to help satisfy this need. Finally, this proposal seeks directly to increase the number of women in engineering. The vehicle is the Engineering Institute that is one of four STEM components of the Governor's Institutes of Vermont. The combination of experimental investigation, modeling and analysis proposed in this proposal to address a critical environmental need will yield the following expected outcomes; 1) the transport behavior of dissolved solutes in media characterized by fine and coarse grained materials separated by a sharp interface will be revealed both qualitatively and quantitatively as a function of time using a novel MRI technology, 2) the veracity of current theory to capture the transport behavior in this system will be evaluated through the fusion of experimental results and transport modeling, and, 3) the experimental results in combination with the modeling will be analyzed to uncover the factors impacting the contaminant-tailing phenomenon which is critical to cost-effective groundwater remediation. The transformative outcomes will be achieved by; 1) employing novel MRI technology to reveal the behavior of tracer transport in porous media, 2) employing mathematical modeling to simulate the behavior observed in the MRI experiments, and, 3) combining experimental and mathematical modeling results to analyze the impact of the movement of tracers in fine-grained media separated from a coarse-grained host by a sharp interface.