High-throughput process development for dewatering of oil sands tailings

本研究的目的是开发一种强大的，可靠的，具有成本效益的处理工艺，用于油砂作业废水的处理。 一个关键的运营挑战是如何处理含有粘土和淤泥颗粒的“尾矿水”，这些颗粒在溶液中非常稳定，因此需要非常长的时间才能自然地从悬浮液中沉淀出来。 这样做的后果是，需要令人难以置信的巨大尾矿池用于储存和处理目的。 现有的处理技术使用带电聚合物来增加颗粒沉降速率。 然而，已经表明该方法对条件的变化非常敏感，因此需要改进的聚合物和更好的控制。 对于这项研究，我们将确定更好的聚合物和低成本的添加剂，协同工作，以改善尾矿沉降动力学，使脱水过程更强大的工艺条件和变化。 我们的方法是使用先进的分析设备，实验设计方法和统计回归工具，以确定最佳的操作条件。

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.