High-throughput process development for dewatering of oil sands tailings

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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.