RESEARCH

PFAS RESEARCH

Mines’ faculty and students are at the forefront of charactering the environmental behavior of PFASs, how humans are exposed to PFASs, and developing treatment technologies for PFAS-impacted soils and drinking water. Working at the molecular scale to the aquifer scale, the Mines’ scientists and engineers are advancing remediation and treatment strategies for difficult-to-treat matrices, evaluating the fate and transport of PFASs at foam-impacted sites, investigating PFAS interactions with biological systems, and modelling molecular-scale PFAS behavior.

Envorinmental Behavior

With respect to environmental behavior, accurately predicting the long-term impacts of PFAS-contaminated groundwater and soil is a critical need for sites where PFASs have been released.  PFAS research at Mines is focused on advancing conceptual site models and modeling approaches that enable site-specific numerical models. Research is being conducted at both the laboratory and field scales to constrain the physico-chemical processes that control PFAS transport of PFASs and determine the parameters that characterize these processes.

Treatment Technologies

When it comes to treatment technologies, PFAS scientists and engineers at Mines are working to identify technologies to remediate water and soil as well as challenging PFAS contamination scenarios and matrices. Research teams are evaluating and working to improve technologies proven to be effective for treating groundwater (e.g., GAC, IX) and developing innovative alternative technologies such as hydrothermal processing and novel catalytic systems. This work also includes applying advances in computational chemistry and molecular modeling to calculate critical physiochemical PFAS properties and elucidating PFAS degradation mechanisms.

Human Exposure

Finally, scientists at Mines are working to characterize how and when humans are exposed to PFASs, either through historical impacts to drinking water, contamination of food supplies (via impacted crops and/or other foods such as fish), or human exposure to PFASs via other means.  These efforts include measuring and modeling the accumulation of PFASs in food, but also measuring and predicting when PFAS-impacted communities became exposed.  Much of this work is in collaboration with the Colorado School of Public Health.