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 develop**sustainable technologies to treat tailing ponds. The growing tailings ponds resulting from oil sands mining have**large volumes of finely dispersed clays that settle very slowly. Current treatment technologies for tailings**ponds 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 analyze**more efficient polymer flocculants for oil sands tailings, and bridge the gap between mesoscale modeling and**advanced polymer design. We plan to reach this goal by: 1) developing new experimental methods to**understand 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. We**expect the proposed methodology to accelerate the research progress while significantly reducing resource**requirements.