High-throughput process development for dewatering of oil sands tailings

本研究的目的是为油砂作业废水的处理开发一种强大、可靠、经济的处理工艺。一个关键的操作挑战是如何处理含有粘土和淤泥颗粒的“尾矿水”，这些颗粒在溶液中非常稳定，因此需要很长时间才能自然沉降。这样做的后果是需要巨大的尾矿池来储存和处理。现有的处理技术使用带电聚合物来提高颗粒沉降速度。然而，这一过程对条件的变化非常敏感，因此需要改进聚合物和更好的控制。在这项研究中，我们将确定更好的聚合物和低成本添加剂，它们协同作用，改善尾矿沉降动力学，使脱水过程对工艺条件和变化更加稳健。我们的方法是使用先进的分析设备、实验方法设计和统计回归工具来确定最佳操作条件。

The objective of this research is to develop a robust, reliable, and cost-effective treatment process for the treatment of wastewater from oil sands operations. A key operational challenge is how to treat the 'tailings water' that contains clay and silt particles that are remarkably stable in solution and thus take incredibly long times to naturally settle out of suspension. The consequence of this is that incredibly massive tailings ponds are needed for storage and treatment purposes. The existing treatment technologies use charged polymers to increase the particle settling rate. However, it has been shown that this process is quite sensitive to variations in the conditions and thus improved polymers and better controls are needed. For this research we will identify better polymers and low-cost additives that work synergistically to improve the tailings sedimentation kinetics such that the dewatering process is more robust to process conditions and variations. Our approach is to use advanced analytical equipment, design-of experiments methodologies, and statistical regression tools to identify the optimal operating conditions.