In the process of screening a soil against a certain contaminant, we define the health-risk based preliminary remediation goal (PRG) as the contaminant concentration above which some remedial action may be required. PRG is thus the first standard (or guidance) for judging a site. An over-estimated PRG (a too-large value) may cause us to miss some contaminated sites that can threaten human health and the environment. An under-estimated PRG (a too-small value), on the other hand, may lead to unnecessary cleanup and waste tremendous resources. The PRGs for soils are often calculated on the assumption that the contaminant concentration in soil does not change with time. However, that concentration usually decreases with time as a result of different chemical and transport mechanisms. The static assumption thus exaggerates the long-term exposure dose and results in a too-small PRG. We present a box model that considers all important transport processes and obeys the law of mass conservation. We can use the model as a tool to estimate the transient contaminant concentrations in air, soil and groundwater. Using these concentrations in conjunction with appropriate health risk parameters, we may estimate the PRGs for different contaminants. As an example, we calculated the tritium PRG …

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Although there are five effective shear moduli for any layered VTI medium, one and only one effective shear modulus for the layered system contains all the dependence of pore fluids on the elastic or poroelastic constants that can be observed in vertically polarized shear waves. Pore fluids can increase the magnitude the shear energy stored by this modulus by a term that ranges from the smallest to the largest shear moduli of the VTI system. But, since there are five shear moduli in play, the increase in shear energy overall is reduced by a factor of about 5 in general. We can therefore give definite bounds on the maximum increase of shear modulus, being about 20% of the permitted range, when gas is fully replaced by liquid. An attendant increase of density (depending on porosity and fluid density) by approximately 5 to 10% partially offsets the effect of this shear modulus increase. Thus, an increase of shear wave speed on the order of 5 to 10% is shown to be possible when circumstances are favorable - i.e., when the shear modulus fluctuations are large (resulting in strong anisotropy), and the medium behaves in an undrained fashion due to fluid trapping. …

Time synchronization is a major challenge and a rich area of study in ultra-wideband (UWB) communication systems. Transmitted-reference (TR) receivers avoid the stringent synchronization requirements that exist in conventional pulse detection schemes. However, the performance of such receivers is highly sensitive to precise timing acquisition and tracking of integration window that defines the limits of the finite integrator prior to final decision block. In this paper we propose a novel rapid synchronization technique that allows us to extract the timing information very accurately in UWB-TR receivers in the presence of a variety of channel noise and interference. The principles of the method are presented and the BER performance of a synchronized UWB-TR receiver is investigated in the presence of a range of values for timing jitter by computer simulations. Our studies show that the proposed synchronization technique greatly improves the performance of UWB-TR receivers in the presence of jitter and AWGN with modest increase in complexity.