Program consists of the following six research focus areas.
In addition to being very costly, conventional disposal practices usually remove the sandy and silty materials that build and maintain beaches and barrier islands. Regarding contaminated dredged material, the demand for offshore capping will increase as upland and other traditional options become more and more scarce. Open water placement options for contaminated and noncontaminated materials are presently constrained by a lack of predictive tools, assessment capabilities, and operational guidance for the physical aspects of placement and environmental interactions. For nearshore placement, detailed monitoring and evaluation of prototype demonstration projects will be combined with physical model evaluation and numerical model improvements to produce well-documented design procedures and predictions of environmental impacts. For offshore placement, research will focus on developing siting and configuration criteria, predicting the performance of various construction techniques including capping, evaluating long-term behavior and integrity, and providing integrated design guidance.