11:02 a.m., June 30, 2009----Two professors in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Delaware have received a four-year $1.84 million grant from the Department of Defense's Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) to develop mathematical models that will enable accurate prediction of the fate and transport of munitions constituents in soil.

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Led by Herbert Allen, professor emeritus, and Dominic M. Di Toro, Edward C. Davis Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the project will be carried out in collaboration with the U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical & Biological Center and the National Research Council's Biotechnology Research Institute in Montreal.

According to Allen, who is also director of UD's Center for the Study of Metals in the Environment (CSME), millions of acres of land containing elevated levels of explosives and related materials have been identified in the United States, with the estimated cost to assess and remediate these sites ranging from $8-$35 billion dollars as of 2003.

The sites include ranges on closing military installations, closed ranges on active installations, and formerly used defense sites. They pose significant public safety, health, and environmental risks, including potential explosive hazards; long-term health problems, such as cancer and damage to the heart, liver, and kidneys; and contaminated soil, groundwater, and surface water.

“Effective technologies are needed for predicting the fate and transport of munitions constituents at explosive-contaminated sites,” Allen says, “and these phenomena depend on three key factors -- dissolution rate, degradation rate, and partitioning to soil. With an improved understanding of these factors, we can develop accurate predictive models.”

Di Toro explains that because munitions constituents are highly polar compounds, orders-of-magnitude errors result when researchers attempt to quantify sorption properties using traditional methods applied to less polar organic contaminants such as PCBs.

“We hope that this investigation will provide critical information for developing fate and transport models at contaminated sites for use in risk assessment,” Di Toro says. “Such models can be applied at sites totaling more than 15 million acres of land throughout the U.S. The results of the work will enable the DoD to meet its goal of keeping ranges open and available for training and testing while protecting human health and the environment.”

CSME is a multi-institutional consortium of scientists and engineers working to further the understanding of processes affecting the fate and effects of metals in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Supported by a number of government and industrial organizations, CSME was established at UD in 2001.

Article by Diane Kukich
Photo by Doug Baker