SERDP FY 2025 New Start Projects

 Environmental Restoration (ER) Program Area

The objective of this Statement of Need (SON) was to seek innovative research that leads to a better understanding of the physical-chemical properties of PFAS in order to predict their behavior within various environmental systems, engineered treatment systems, and biota. Specifically, the goal was to address the following research needs:

• Evaluate data on conventional physical-chemical properties for PFAS that have been reported in order to clarify inconsistencies in reporting, and identify and address critical data gaps. 
• Develop fundamental chemistry-based models that better estimate PFAS distributions between environmental phases and organism phases of individual PFAS in legacy and modern fluorotelomer-based aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF).
• Develop models that can predict properties from structure-activity relationships such as linear solvation energy relationships (LSERs) and poly-parameter linear free energy relationships (pp-LFERs). 
• Develop an improved understanding of the environmental phases/interfaces and corresponding phase distribution behavior that are controlling partitioning in the subsurface and impact fate and transport. 
• Develop an improved understanding of the organisms and organism compartments that most strongly accumulate PFAS mass. 

The selection of projects that will be funded to address this SON will be complete in Fall 2024. 

Research should lead to an improved understanding of the physical-chemical properties of PFAS is critical to ultimately understanding their fate in the environment. Such information will ultimately lead to improved management of PFAS in the environment.