Multi-sensor Dean Stark alternative for online bitumen/solids/water estimation

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In the context of oil sands sensing, very few commercial technologies exist, and the lack of sensors has held back progress in automation, monitoring, control and optimization of the extraction process.This project involves the development of a sensor that can measure the composition, i.e. the bitumen, water and clay content in the process streams in oil sands extraction online. This information is vital for the monitoring, control and optimization of the process, but is challenging for many reasons: the widely varying composition in the process streams and the complexity of the mixtures themselves in terms of the number of components. This will be addressed in this project by using a multifunctional sensor, i.e. an array of techniques, and by combining the information from these sensors using sophisticated data fusion and informatics techniques. The elements of the sensing strategy include multiple spectroscopic and microwave-based techniques, which can be deployed online. These sensors will be calibrated against offline techniques so that they can then be employed online in a 'soft sensing' framework.