Computational fluid dynamics investigation of bitumen residues in oil sands tailings transport in an industrial horizontal pipe

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Sontti, Somasekhara Goud
  • Sadeghi, Mohsen
  • Khou, Kaiyu
  • Zheng, Enzu
  • Zhang, Xuehua

• Pipeline transport is commonly used in the oil sand industry to convey crushed oil sand ores and tailings. Bitumen residues in the oil sand tailings can be a threat to the environment that separating them from tailings before disposal is crucial. However, low bitumen concentration in the tailing slurry and the complex transport characteristics of the four-phase mixture make the process difficult. This study establishes an Eulerian–Eulerian (E–E) computational fluid dynamics model for an industrial-scale oil sand tailings pipeline. A comprehensive sensitivity analysis was conducted on the selection of carrier-solid and solid-bitumen drag models. The combination of small and large particle sizes (i.e., 75 and 700 μm) and bitumen droplet size (i.e., 400 μm) provided good agreement with field data in velocity profiles and pressure drop. The validated model was subsequently extended to investigate the influence of the secondary phase (i.e., bitumen droplets and bubbles) on flow characteristics in a tailing pipeline. The investigation covered a range of bitumen droplet size (100–400 μm), bitumen fraction (0.0025–0.1), bubble size (5–1000 μm), and bubble fraction (0.0025–0.3) and their influences on the velocity, solids, and bitumen distribution are revealed. For an optimum bubble size of 500 μm, a maximum recovery of 59% from the top 50% and 83% from the top 75% of the pipe cross section was obtained. The present study demonstrates the preferential distribution of bitumen and provides valuable insight into bitumen recovery from an industrial-scale tailing pipeline.

• Date created

  2023-01-01

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Interfaces
  • Gravitational force
  • Computational fluid dynamics
  • Fluid flows
  • Multiphase flows
  • Turbulent flows
  • Kinetic theory
  • Particle distributions
  • Statistical mechanics models

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-9a2f-qq29

• License

  This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. This article appeared in Sontti, S. G., Sadeghi, M., Zhou, K., Zhang, X., & Zheng, E. (2023). Computational fluid dynamics investigation of bitumen residues in oil sands tailings transport in an industrial horizontal pipe. Physics of Fluids, 35(1). and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0132129.