Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

An innovative series of optical fiber sensors for water monitoring, based on spectroscopic interrogation, is presented. Two types of custom-design instrumentation were developed, both making use of LED light sources and low-cost detectors to perform broadband spectral measurements in the visible spectral range. The first was designed especially to perform direct absorption spectroscopy, while the second provided turbidity measurements. Designed for water analysis and industrial process control, the proposed instruments can be used by operators with little or no technical skills.

Measurements in soils of the effective metal concentration using DGT (diffusive gradients in thin-films) generally correlate very well with the concentrations of metals in plants grown in the same soil. While the goodness of fit varies, depending on the metal, plant species and soil type, it is generally better than the fit to other soil measurements.

Transport models based on calibrated flow models may often yield wrong predictions unless recalibrated with the aid of environmental tracers because migration velocity depends on the ratio of hydraulic conductivity to porosity whereas flow rates depend on transmissivity.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Research and Development (ORD) is the scientific research arm of EPA. ORD conducts research on ways to prevent pollution, protect human health, and reduce risk. Much of the research related to demonstration and evaluation of innovative cleanup technologies is conducted in ORD’s National Risk Management Research Laboratory.

An overview of permeable reactive barrier (PRB) performance for field sites in the U.S. was evaluated over the last 10 years by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development (EPA-ORD) in collaboration with other U.S. federal agencies, consulting companies and academic institutions under activities sponsored by the EPA’s Remedial Technology Development Forum (RTDF).

Sewage sludge (biosolids) application on land as a fertilizer and soil improver, and high-volume sulfidic mining waste disposal and use as a common fill are anthropogenic activities that increasingly contribute to heavy metal enrichment of soil and ground water.

A new concept for the mediating action of humic substances (HS) in the contaminated environment is developed. It defines three scenarios of mitigating activity of HS in the system “living cell-ecotoxicant”.

Composting of MSW is of great importance for both developed and developing countries. It can be applied with the aim of reducing the total volume of MSW, thus lowering landfilling costs, and if properly treated after careful source separation it can be a source material for substrate used in greenhouses or to amend soils with OM.

Organic matter is able to bind heavy metals. Enrichment of soil with organic matter could reduce the content of bioavailable metal species as a result of complexation of free ions of heavy metals.

The use of activated carbon may help overcome the toxicity of organic pollutants to microbes and plants during soil bioremediation. Experiments were conducted with 3,4-dichloroaniline (DCA), 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene (TNT), and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) to demonstrate that activated carbon (AC) can reduce the toxicity of readily available chemicals in soil by transferring them to a less toxic soil fraction.