Biofiltration of Volatile Pollutants: Solubility Effects
This project investigates and collects fundamental partitioning data for a variety of sparingly soluble subsurface contaminants (e.g., TCE, etc.) between vapor, aqueous phase, and matrices containing substantial quantities of biomass and biomass components. Due to the difficulty of obtaining these measurements, environmental models have generally used solubility constants of chemicals in pure water or, in a few rare cases, simple linear models. Our prior EMSP work has shown that the presence of biological material can increase effective solubilities by an order of magnitude for sparingly soluble organics; therefore, the previous simple approaches are not valid and are extremely poor predictors of actual bio-influenced partitioning. It is likely that environmental contaminants will partition in a similar manner into high-biomass phases (e.g. biobarriers and plants) or humic soils. Biological material in the subsurface can include lipids, fatty acids, humic materials, as well a s the lumped and difficult to estimate 'biomass'. Our measurements include partition into these biological materials to allow better estimation. Fundamental data collected will be used in mathematical models predicting transport and sorption in subsurface environments, with the impacts on bioremediation being evaluated based on this new information. Our 2-D Win95/98 software program, Biofilter 1.0, developed as a part of our prior EMSP efforts for describing biofiltration processes with consideration given to both kinetic and mass transfer factors, will be extended to incorporate and use this information.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab., Oak Ridge, TN (US)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) (US)
- OSTI ID:
- 834467
- Report Number(s):
- EMSP-73793-2001; R&D Project: EMSP 73793; TRN: US200432%%370
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 15 Jun 2001
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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