February Technical Seminar - Wednesday 27th February 2019

Topic: MiHPT and UVOST: Emerging Real Time, High Resolution Investigation Techniques 

Venue: WSP – Level 27, 680 George Street, Sydney

Time: 5.30 drinks and nibbles, 6.00 presentation begins

WSP Contact: Yliane Yvanes-Giuliani 0451 535 351

Presenters:

Matt Hansen is the General Manager at Numac Drilling Services Australia. Having worked in the Environmental Drilling industry for almost 15 years, Matt has led the expansion of Numac’s HRSC capabilities.  

Pedro Balbachevsky is a Principal Environmental Engineer at AECOM. He has been designing, building and operating remediation systems for contaminated soil and groundwater for the past 19 years.

Daniel Der Tateossian has 5 years’ experience with AECOM’s contaminated land team, where he works on a variety of remediation projects and phase 2 site investigations. 

Topic:

The presentation will cover two emerging investigation techniques in Australia and will provide real world examples of where these have been applied. These techniques are:

MiHPT - the combined Membrane Interface Probe and the Hydraulic Profiling Tool which allows detection of volatile contaminants, measures soil electrical conductivity and measures HPT injection pressure, an estimate hydraulic conductivity and water table elevation.

UVOST - the Ultra Violet Optical Screening Tool allows delineation of petroleum hydrocarbons (particularly PAHs) through contact from ultraviolet light fired horizontally from a saffire window in the direct push rod using Laser Induced Fluorescence.  

Matt will cover specifics of how these techniques function and what they detect; how best to deploy them in a project; a cost benefit analysis and the sustainability advantages. 

Daniel and Pedro will then present on three high-resolution characterisation case studies completed in New South Wales. They will discuss the results obtained from the various investigation technologies and show how these advancements allow for a better understanding of the spatial distribution of contaminants (both dissolved and free phase) and also enabled the consultants to compare overlapping releases generated in different time periods.