The article was published on February 1, 2026, and is available now online. His coauthors are Hairong Wang, Lohita Rajesh, Ana Rita Lopes, and Gregory Lowry of Carnegie Mellon University, and Thomas Hoelen of Chevron Oil, Products, and Gas.
Kavish is a Senior Staff Professional based in Pennsylvania with experience conducting environmental investigations supporting contaminated site assessment and remediation. For such projects, he often leads monitoring, characterization, and remediation work.
The Journal of Hazardous Materials publishes full-length papers, review articles, and research on hazardous substances and their effects on human health and the environment, including their detection, risk assessment, and mitigation.
Abstract
Advances in robotics and automation enhance workforce safety and increase the speed of environmental site characterization. Accordingly, real-time, robot-deployable sensing methods with sufficient analytical performance are needed to support site management decisions. We evaluated two autonomous approaches for soil total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) screening: (1) thermal desorption followed by gas chromatography (TD) and (2) direct sensing using a portable near-infrared (NIR) spectrometer. Soil samples from two crude-oil-impacted sites were analyzed and benchmarked against USEPA Method 8015 C (solvent extraction and gas chromatography with FID detection). The TD method achieved high precision and agreed with the USEPA reference within 3–27 % across 2270–18,980 ppm TPH, but requires complex thermal and gas-handling hardware that would have to be engineered for robustness and to be intrinsically safe. The NIR method enabled rapid, reagent-free analysis; however, it also showed larger deviations (20–40%) among samples. A prototype robotic platform integrating the NIR module was developed and tested in controlled outdoor conditions, demonstrating the feasibility of autonomous, real-time screening. The present study selected a few soil matrices and a realistic range of TPH concentrations to evaluate analytical trends between the two robot-deployable TPH sensors and compared their potential robotic deployment feasibility. Future work should further expand the number of soils and sites, refine the NIR calibration transferability, and engineer the TD–GC components to achieve fully integrated robotic deployment in field settings.
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For more information on environmental investigations and automation of field work, contact Kavish at Kavish.Ganesh@Geosyntec.com.
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