Abandoned Mine Drainage (AMD) is one of the largest sources of stream impairment in Pennsylvania. Billions of gallons of AMD impair over 5,500 miles of streams within the commonwealth. The AMD discharge stream shown below has an average pH of 2.8 and has impaired the entire stream it is being discharged into.

Cosmos Technologies has developed an innovative, patented Advanced Catalytic Oxidation Process for removing heavy metals from AMD. The Cosmos Process was able to achieve greater than 99% removal of iron and aluminum from the above AMD stream located in PA. Cosmos is currently working with a Watershed Association to install a pilot-scale unit of the Cosmos treatment system for removing iron and aluminum from this AMD stream. This pilot-scale facility will be installed by October 2020 and will be functional for six months through April 2021.

The application of a pilot-scale treatment system will help determine the adsorptive capacity and regeneration rate of the catalyst. This field trial will also help study the behavior of aluminum hydroxide sludge with changing pH.

​Implement and install a full-scale AMD treatment system by May 2021 to remove iron and aluminum from the AMD stream using the Cosmos Advanced Catalytic Oxidation Process.

Limited knowledge on the behavior and adsorption capacity of the catalyst in a continuous treatment process as apposed to a batch process.

​Conduct further experiments in the laboratory to determine the unknowns in the treatment cycle.

Laboratory experiments and field data collected from conducting the Cosmos process trials will establish the exhaustive capacity of the catalyst and the efficiency of the treatment system in removing iron and aluminum from varying flowrate and concentration of contaminants in the AMD stream.

​Flooding is one of the major natural disasters with devastating consequences. The application of numerical models to calculate the inundation and exerted forces of flood events is critical in developing mitigation plans. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is a group of numerical model techniques used to simulate flows in the most complete and accurate approach. CFD has been used extensively for mechanical and biomedical applications in the past. However, there is an increasing number of cases in which CFD is used to analyze environmental fluids as rivers, lakes, and air patterns. Also, CFD is used in specific engineering designs as channels, dams, piers, water reservoirs, and water treatment processes. 

​Study CFD method to compute flow distribution in flooding events.

​Different one and two dimensional (1D and 2D, respectively) hydraulic program present different flow distribution in flooding events.

​We made use of CFD to analyze the flooding in meandering channels. We present results from two (2) CFD codes: Flow-3D and OpenFOAM.

​CFD results will be able to produce consistent results between Flow-3D and OpenFOAM. The results served to analyze other results from 1D and 2D models to recommend the most appropriate codes for flooding event simulations.