Connecting microstructure and rheology for enhanced oil sands tailings reclamation

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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.