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Skip to Search Results- 1Afshar, Shima
- 1Arora, Nitin
- 1Chen, Huanchen
- 1Chini, Seyed Farshid
- 1Darius, Juan
- 1Dechaine, Greg Paul
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Mechanisms of Aggregation and Separation of Water and Solids from Bitumen Froth using Cluster Size Distribution
DownloadFall 2016
The large-scale corrosion and equipment damage caused by water and solids respectively in bitumen froth necessitate their removal using various methods. This study is aimed at understanding how water and solids aggregate (water-water, water-solid and solid-solid) in bitumen froth and what the...
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Spring 2010
Most crude oils contain traces of vanadyl porphyrins within their asphaltene fraction. Although these metals are only present in trace quantities, they have a significant detrimental impact on crude oil processing units; therefore, their selective removal is highly desirable. The current work...
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Spring 2016
Effect of rotation on dynamcis of flow in microchannels is studied. In the frist study, an analytical solution is developed for the unsteady flow of fluid through a parallel rotating plate microchannel, under the influence of electrokinetic force using the Debye–Hückel (DH) approximation....
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Colloid Science of Sand Remediation: A Study Motivated by the Non-Aqueous Extraction of Bitumen from Oil Sands
DownloadFall 2014
The current water-based method of bitumen extraction requires withdrawal of fresh water from the Athabasca River — a practice which leads to the continual buildup of tailings ponds and other environmental concerns. As Alberta’s bitumen production is expected to more than double by 2020, there is...
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Fall 2015
Drop transfer from one solid surface to another through stretching liquid bridges between them is important for many industrial applications. Due to the different dominate forces, three possible regimes exist: Quasi-static Regime, where the transfer process is only dominated by surface forces;...
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Spring 2015
The minable oil sands extraction process can be understood on a scale of a single oil sand grain. When the oil sand ore is mixed with warm water, each sand granule is initially covered with bitumen film which ruptures under the composite effect of shear and interfacial forces, while water...
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Effect of Temperature, Phase Change, and Chemical Additive on Interfacial Properties and Performance of Steam Applications
DownloadFall 2019
When considering the wettability state during steam applications, we find that most issues remain unanswered. Removal of polar groups from the rock surface with increasing temperature improves water wettability; however, other factors, including phase change, play a reverse role. In other words,...
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Studying Structure-Nanoaggregation Relations of Polyaromatic Molecules in the Bulk Oil Phase and at the Oil-Water Interface Using Molecular Dynamics Simulation
DownloadSpring 2014
The detection, identification and characterization of early stage molecular association of polyaromatic molecules into nanoaggregates, where these nanoaggregates represent the first level of molecular clusters or building blocks are critical in areas such as design and fabrication of advanced 3-D...
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Rheology of Bitumen at the Onset of Asphaltene Aggregation and its Effects on the Stability of Water-in-Oil Emulsion
DownloadFall 2015
Asphaltenes are the heaviest fraction of bitumen. Asphaltenes not only play an important role in the high viscosity of bitumen but also in the water-in-oil (W/O) emulsion stability. Nevertheless, their exact function in the stability mechanism of W/O emulsion still remains unresolved. It is...
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Fall 2012
This thesis explored the properties of asphaltene nano-aggregates in crude oil and toluene based solutions and fouling at process furnace temperatures, and the links between these two phenomena. The link between stability of asphaltenes at ambient conditions and fouling at the conditions of a...