SBIR-STTR Award

Near-surface groundwater and contaminant plumes threaten to contaminate the nation's potable groundwater supply. Such contaminant plumes need to be located, characterized, and monitored over time, in order to identify situations where remediation is required and to ensure the recovery of contaminants in such operations. This project will utilize Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) technology to characterize and monitor these contaminant plumes. In Phase I, time-lapse, three-dimensional GPR imaging of contaminant plumes will be performed, and quantitative estimates of the contaminant properties (e.g., saturation/concentration levels) will be made. A time-lapse synthetic GPR data set will be developed and used to test novel methods for imaging, inversion, and uncertainty analysis of contaminant plume property distributions. Time-lapse seismic data processing and inversion/saturation estimation, already successful in the monitoring of petroleum reservoirs during oil production, will be adapted to the processing and inversion of time-lapse, three-dimensional GPR data for groundwater contaminant applications.

Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee:
Three-dimensional, multi-offset ground penetrating radar data are currently expensive to acquire, and high-quality, time-lapse image processing, quantitative property estimation, and uncertainty analysis are not currently available for such data. The proposed technology should fill this market need by developing the necessary software tools and providing a cost-effective capability for the environmental engineering business community. The GPR process will aid remediation of the nation's groundwater supply, which is increasingly threatened by contamination of hazardous waste and petroleum products. The potential market for the technology is huge, with government and private organizations slated to spend as much as $250 billion to clean up as many as 350,000 contaminated sites over the next 30 years

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, federal, state, and local governments, as well as private industry, will spend billions of dollars annually over the next several decades to clean up groundwater sites contaminated with hazardous waste and petroleum products. As many as 350,000 contaminated sites, including many sites operated by DOE, could require cleanup over the next 30 years, at an expense that may exceed $250 billion. This project will develop technology that uses ground-penetrating radar to image groundwater contaminant plumes underground, and monitor them in time-lapse mode as they undergo natural biodegradation or are cleaned up by remediation processes. The technology would enable engineers to monitor the effectiveness of clean-up operations in real time, make adjustments to remediation processes if necessary, and locate any residual contaminants before leaving the site. In Phase I, prototype methods and software algorithms were developed for processing time-lapse radar data; images and quantitative estimations of underground contaminant-saturation distributions were produced; and the feasibility of imaging groundwater contaminants - in the presence of rocks, water, contaminants, and radar noise - was demonstrated. In Phase II, a field trial will be performed at a DOE/DOD contaminant site undergoing active biodegradation or remediative clean-up of groundwater contaminants.

Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee:
In addition to monitoring groundwater contaminants at clean-up sites across the nation, the technology also should be useful for agricultural applications to monitor subsurface soil moisture over time for the enhancement of crop irrigation and production. The technology also may find use in monitoring groundwater depletion and recharge in subsurface aquifers, vital for securing the nation’s supply of fresh water