Girish Kumar Choppala (PhD Student)
University of South Australia
Project Title
Remediation
of Trichlorethylene and Hexavalent chromium in soils
Biography
Girish
has done a masters degree (M.Sc) in chemistry with environment as
his specialization subject. After the completion of his
masters course, he worked on two projects; Estimation of
concentration levels of PAHs in Vizag steel plant, Visakhapatnam
using HPLC and; Assessment of air and water in and around
visakhapatnam city using multimedia. Recently Girish finished
viva-voce for his M.Phil degree and examined the effect of some
rare earth metals on the stabilization of pyrochlore
Bi2Ti2O7.
Start Date
April
2008
Project Details
Many
plating operations use both chromium VI and TCE. The chromium (VI)
is used in chrome plating. The TCE is used to degrease parts prior
to plating. As a result of these uses, plating sites often have
mixed plumes of TCE and hexavalent chromium. Since TCE is
more dense than water, it goes downside into the soil upto 12
metres and settles over there. Cr (VI) is stable at alkaline
soil. TCE and Cr(VI) are toxic in the nature and are
considered as carcinogenic compounds.
There are some technologies to remediate TCE and hexavalent
chromium like pump and treatment and air sparging. Reductive
dechlorination, Chemical oxidation, chemical reduction technologies
are using to dechlorinate TCE only. In presence of TCE, the Cr (VI)
removal capacities by Zero valent iron is decreased by about 40%
when compared with their respecitve CR(VI) removal capacities with
identical groundwater geochemistry but without TCE. Reduction of Cr
(VI) depends on three principles: Reduction of insoluble and
soluble forms of Cr(VI) to forms ot CR(III) that are inert towards
reoxidation; the absence of unwanted reaction products due to the
oxidation of the reducing agent; and the marked changes in soil pH
and Eh.
This research will help in remediating TCE and Cr(VI) in soils
using different reductive technologies to protect human health and
ecosystem integrity.
