Deployment of this commercialized sensor can dramatically improve and accelerate munitions response at former military sites.
Commercially available geophysical sensors that are generally used for munitions response were developed for other applications. They offer only a limited amount of information that can be used for classification to distinguish buried unexploded ordnance (UXO) from harmless pieces of metal found on a site.
In MetalMapper, Dr. Mark Prouty and his team developed and commercialized a purpose-built sensor for munitions classification. MetalMapper is a time-domain electromagnetic system that transmits and receives on multiple axes to provide a much richer data set that can be exploited for classification. The technology builds on many years of combined efforts of scientists in university, government, and industry laboratories conducting the fundamental research that provided the basis for the sensor system.
MetalMapper is now being demonstrated at former military sites across the nation in collaboration with state and federal regulators. The deployment of MetalMapper can dramatically improve and accelerate DoD’s ability to effectively remediate former military sites, reducing risks to the people who use and live on these sites and enabling redevelopment of these lands.
For this work, Dr. Prouty received a Project-of-the-Year award at the annual Partners in Environmental Technology Technical Symposium & Workshop held November 30 – December 2, 2010, in Washington, D.C.
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