Our staff have been consulted on projects involving modeling and remediation of environmental disasters.  One of our recent projects involved understanding the dispersal and transport mechanism of oil droplets resulting from a major oil spill into a Midwestern waterway.  We obtained oil samples from the same oil that contaminated the river and using specialized equipment measured the oil droplet breakdown and resulting size distribution of particles.  This was coupled with a computational model that simulated the transport of oil droplets throughout a river system including dispersal and deposit within a lake.  Also simulated was the effect of a dam on halting the transport of the oil droplets.

As a part of this project a specialized sediment trap was developed in-house for acquiring contaminated sediment and water.  The samples were used to compare against simulation results for calibration.