Through
the support and funding of the U.S. Department
of Energy, this project is phase II of an ongoing three phase project
demonstrating the use of Surfactant Modified Zeolite in a permeable barrier
to groundwater contamination.Through
the support and funding of the U.S. Department
of Energy, this project is phase II of an ongoing three phase project
demonstrating the use of Surfactant Modified Zeolite in a permeable barrier
to groundwater contamination.
This phase of the project deploys a pilot-scale, permeable barrier
to groundwater contamination using the surfactant-modified
zeolite (SMZ) technology developed at
NMT, under the direction of
Prof. Robert S. Bowman. The digital image at the top of this page is
the permeable barrier in a synthetic aquifer at the Large Experimental
Aquifer Program (LEAP) site at the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI).
The OGI field site operation is under the direction of Prof.
Richard L. Johnson. The SMZ barrier is contained in the large yellow
"box" in the center of the image. The barr ier is 6 meters long, 2 meters
deep, and 1 meter wide. This is a shot of the system prior to filling the
entire tank (8.5 X 8.5 X 3.0 m deep) with aquifer material. The white "trees"
seen as a "forest" throughout the tank are sample acquisition nests, the
re are 81 such nests in the system each with 5 distinct sampling levels.
The LEAP site at OGI is designed to facilitate
large-scale transport experiments by offering controllable aquifer flow
regimes, high-density sample acquisition networks, onsite data analysis/storage/transfer,
while maintaining a safe and containable contaminant delivery/storage system.
All of these amenities are used in this project to build a re liable database
for follow-on applications of SMZ as well as applications of permeable
barriers in general.
Note: Publications are available upon
request.
