Assessment of engineering solutions for contaminated lands

As well as looking at how to clean up large areas of contaminated land, we are investigating methods to assess the effectiveness of engineering solutions applied to contaminated sites. The nature of the ground is very variable (clays, sands, gravels mixed together) and this creates a large uncertainty in assessing whether the solutions applied have been effective or not. The ground is like a black box; unless you excavate the whole soil, you will not be able to see what has happened. We are trying to develop innovative methods that can be used to assess the current condition of a site without removing the soil.

We recently started research on innovative tracers, which can be injected from one side of a contaminated site and then extracted from the other. By examining the pattern of how the tracers move from one side to the other, we are hoping to characterize how the contaminants are distributed in the ground. The idea is to use these tracers before and after the clean-up so that the efficiency of the clean-up method can be assessed.

We are also examining the effectiveness of physical barriers used to contain contaminants in the ground. At the moment, there is uncertainty concerning how long these containment systems will last. Hence, there is a need to check their performance at regular intervals. In collaboration with Cambridge Insitu, a local company specializing in field testing , we are developing a tool capable of assessing the performance of containment systems in-situ. The tool measures the permeability, strength and stiffness of containment systems directly. This has many potential advantages compared with having to remove parts of the barrier for testing in a laboratory.

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Other environmentally related projects:

In-situ clean up of contaminated land