Rehabilitation of brownfields, contaminated sites and waste disposal sites is a crucial issue in the perspective of sustainable development and is a costly 
task, which affects the planning of urban and infrastructure development. With the present assessment techniques, the estimate of the budget required for 
rehabilitation is often very rough and the risk of an unexpected remarkable growth of the costs during operations strongly discourages the private investments 
on brownfields. Thus, for effective rehabilitation planning and engineering safety and efficiency, it is extremely important that sub-surface is accurately 
imaged prior to the commencement of remediation. Currently, however, there is no dedicated technology that can provide reliable and consistent high resolution 
sub-surface information for the wide variety of ground conditions met in this field. Geophysical methods have a tremendous potential for the 3-D evaluation 
of used/contaminated ground but current techniques are unfit to satisfy end-user's requirements. There is an urgent need for a reliable non-intrusive technology 
for subsurface characterisation of contaminated land based on an integrated approach. 
            

Expected impacts    
   
HYGEIA will provide    
* classification of brownfield and contaminated sites of use to plan management and rehabilitation based on information about past use of land    
* survey technologies based on the integration of seismics, resistivity and GPR. Among them, surface waves and Same Wavelength Electromagnetic and Elastic 
Prospecting (SWEEP) to overcome present limits of the individual geophysical methods    
* innovative seismic and GPR data acquisition tools for enhanced shallow high resolution prospecting    
* original software for data processing, modelling, inversion and interpretation, which is instrumental to obtain enhanced subsurface information and 
push the proposed geophysical methods to their limits    
* databases of physical properties and geophysical data from laboratory and field experiments that will help selection of useful techniques in future studies 
   
* Theoretical models and simulation algorithms which allow quantitative validation of survey results    
* Decision support system and end-users guidelines which will serve as reference forrehabilitation industry and allow safe and cost-effective exploitation 
of the proposed technology.    
* In synthesis, end-users may expect to obtain from the project databases and technology for rapid and cost-effective high-resolution non-invasive evaluation 
of used/contaminated land to minimise costs and risks of rehabilitation actions 
            

The decision support tool developed is GeoPASS  
  
GeoPASS is a PC-based decision support system for the selection of an optimal geophysical technique for subsurface reconnaissance on land.   
  
GeoPASS includes modules for:   
electrical resistivity method   
electrical resistivity tomography (bore hole to bore hole)   
time domain electromagnetic methods   
electromagnetic induction method (conductivity meters)   
ground penetrating radar (50 MHz and a user selected frequency)   
induced polarisation   
metallic object detection (includes magnetic method and metal detectors)   
seismic reflection techniques   
spectral analysis of surface waves   
The geophysical methods can be assessed on the detection chance on four target categories:   
layers (including LNAPL's)   
pollution plumes   
DNAPL's/solid waste/objects/cavities   
fractures   
  
Its home page is: http://www.nitg.tno.nl/eng/projects/geop ... 
            

Web site http://www.hygeia-eu.org appears to be non-functional