Connecting microstructure and rheology for enhanced oil sands tailings reclamation

连接微观结构和流变学以增强油砂尾矿回收

• 批准号: 486638-2015
• 负责人: Trifkovic, Milana
• 金额: $ 2.91万
• 依托单位: University of Calgary
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Collaborative Research and Development Grants
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2017-01-01 至 2018-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=618312
• 关键词: Connecting; microstructure; rheology; enhanced; oil

There is a need for oil sands industry to make bitumen extraction processes more efficient and developsustainable technologies to treat tailing ponds. The growing tailings ponds resulting from oil sands mining havelarge volumes of finely dispersed clays that settle very slowly. Current treatment technologies for tailingsponds are based on trial-and-error or past experience; they do not allow the rapid reclamation of tailing ponds.In this research proposal we plan to develop novel in-silico and experimental methods to discover and analyzemore efficient polymer flocculants for oil sands tailings, and bridge the gap between mesoscale modeling andadvanced polymer design. We plan to reach this goal by: 1) developing new experimental methods tounderstand the principles of clay/polymer interaction in oil sands tailings at an unprecedented level of detail,and 2) using these findings to develop new predictive models and technologies to treat oil sands tailings. Weexpect the proposed methodology to accelerate the research progress while significantly reducing resourcerequirements.

油砂行业有必要提高沥青提取过程的效率，并开发可持续发展的尾矿库处理技术。由油砂开采产生的不断增长的尾矿库拥有大量分散细小的粘土，沉降速度非常慢。目前尾矿砂的处理技术是基于反复试验或过去的经验，它们不允许尾矿库的快速回收。在这项研究方案中，我们计划开发新的硅内和实验方法，以发现和分析更有效的油砂尾矿聚合物絮凝剂，并弥合介观模拟和先进的聚合物设计之间的差距。我们计划通过以下方式实现这一目标：1)开发新的实验方法，以前所未有的详细程度了解油砂尾矿中粘土/聚合物相互作用的原理；2)利用这些发现开发新的预测模型和技术来处理油砂尾矿。我们预计，所提出的方法将加快研究进展，同时显著减少资源需求。