| Since 1992,
West Virginia University has managed a cooperative
agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy’s
Office of Science and Technology that facilitates the
collaboration of university researchers with industrial
partners. Through its Civil and Environmental Engineering
Department led by Dr. Echol Cook, WVU fosters
collaborations that are finding solutions to tough
environmental problems faced by OST. WVU’s
deployment assistance under this cooperative agreement
has resulted in the field testing and large-scale
demonstrations of environmental technologies. A diverse group of
projects, focusing on technologies in latter stages of
maturation, support OST in the areas of subsurface
contaminants, mixed waste, deactivation and
decommissioning, and efficient separations. Among the
sponsored research projects are
- Demonstrating
drain-enhanced soil flushing for contaminants
removal (see previous article, this issue).
- Analyzing
Vortec’s Cyclone Melting System (see Initiatives,
October 1996) for remediation of
polychlorinated biphenyl–contaminated soils.
This project, jointly worked by WVU and Vortec
Corporation researchers, is redesigning
components from Vortec’s Cyclone Melting
System to retrofit it for remediating
PCB-contaminated soils via ex situ vitrification.
- Producing
and evaluating biosorbents and cleaning solutions
for deactivation and decommissioning. WVU
researchers from the Civil and Environmental
Engineering Department are evaluating biosorbents
and cleaning solutions produced by the Institute
of Gas Technology.
- Using
SpinTek’s centrifugal membrane technology
(see Initiatives,
October 1996) for D&D. This
project uses SpinTek’s centrifugal membrane
technology to filter the sorbents/cleaning agents
developed through the efforts of the IGT
biosorbents project. Another project that SpinTek
is participating in is exploring the use of novel
membranes to expand the number of wastes that can
be treated with SpinTek’s centrifugal
membrane technology. A third SpinTek project is
developing an optimum configuration to improve
the capacity of the rotating filtration system
with respect to energy consumption and cost.
- Using
environmental pollution control devices based on
novel forms of carbon. Carbon Materials Group at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, Applied Sciences, Inc.,
Concurrent Technologies Corporation, and Swanson
Plating Company, along with WVU researchers, are
assessing the feasibility of an electrochemical
system that uses high-surface-area carbon devices
to remove heavy metals from aqueous streams. The
technology can also remove some radionuclides
from water.
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