Probe Techniques for Studying Mediated Reduction Reactions of Organic Pollutants: Research Initiation Award

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This is an award to support research to find a strategy for describing the reduction kinetics of organic substrates in natural environments that is both rigorously deterministic in theory as well as being amenable to practical application. The approach will be to treat the substance directly responsible for the reduction of organic pollutants as electron-transfer mediators that are present at low steady- state concentration and can be assayed by their rate of reaction with selective probe compounds. The first part of this project will be to identify suitable probe compounds for likely reduction mediators, and to verify that these techniques can be used in natural media. Later, the most promising probe technique will be applied to show that the mediator to which the probe technique responds is, in fact, contributing to reduction in environmental systems. Finally, the utility of the whole approach for predicting the rate of specific reduction reactions of organic pollutants in the environment will be demonstrated. The proposal leading to this award was submitted in response to NSF 88-99 as modified by changes dated 09/19/91 to make the Research Initiation Award announcement consistent with changes in NSF 83-57 and published as NSF 90- 77. Despite recent research on the reduction reactions of organic pollutants in anaerobic sediments, soils, and groundwaters, it is not yet possible to quantitatively predict the rates of any of these transformations. This severely restricts the consideration of reduction processes in regulatory decision- making and contributes to the unreliability of remediation technologies that rely on these reactions. If this research proves to be as successful as it was for describing the kinetics of photooxidation in sunlit surface water, it is likely to influence the way most research on the kinetics of reduction reactions in anaerobic environmental systems is done in the future. Results of this research are likely to be applied to engineering design of processes and systems for decontamination of soils and groundwater.