Segregation of the PAH-Contaminated Fraction of Hydraulically Dredged Sediment
Publication: Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 135, Issue 5
Abstract
Semivolatile hydrophobic organic contaminants (SV-HOCs) in sediments are a growing problem. Previous research in our laboratory has demonstrated that cleanup of the entire sediment may not be necessary due to sequestration of the majority of SV-HOCs like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) into the low density fraction that we hypothesize is separable from the bulk sediment hydraulically. In our current study, PAH-contaminated sediments from the Indiana Harbor Canal were hydraulically dredged and impounded in a stilling basin by the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers to evaluate a hydraulic dredge and characterize water treatment needs. This project provided an opportunity to test our hypothesis that a segregation of SV-HOC contaminated sediments would occur via hydraulic settling processes in the stilling basin at field scale. Following decommission of the basin, sediment cores were collected along transects from the basin influent immediately after removal of the overlying water, sectioned and characterized for physical and chemical parameters. As hypothesized, sediments showed large decreases in bulk density with increasing distance from the basin inlet. PAH concentrations increased up to 40-fold and were highly correlated with the fraction of low density material in the sediment. Our results provide evidence that hydraulic dredging can result in a separation of highly contaminated sediment with high amounts of low density material from bulk sediment. This outcome may be either fortuitous or detrimental depending on the ultimate means of disposal. If subsequent dewatering occurs (such as in a confined disposal facility), prediction of PAH volatilization flux needs to be based on the in situ surface concentration which can be very high due to slow settling low density particles. Conversely, if the goal is beneficial reuse, higher density sediment with relatively low PAH levels near the inlet may be readily collected.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Grant No. NSFBES-0348512. The sediment samples were supplied by the USACE-CD. The writers thank Dr. Menka Mittal and Jayashree Jayaraj for data and laboratory assistance, and Ajit Vaidya from USACE-CD for access to the stilling basin sediment.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 135 • Issue 5 • May 2009
Pages: 291 - 298
Copyright
© 2009 ASCE.
History
Received: Dec 11, 2007
Accepted: Oct 19, 2008
Published online: Feb 19, 2009
Published in print: May 2009
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