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Fall 2016

Curran, Meghan D

Caustic is the most commonly used process aid to improve processability of mineable oil sands ores in the Athabasca region. The addition of caustic adjusts the pH of the extraction process, disperses clays, and acts as a water softener. Understanding how these changes affect the fundamental...

Fall 2016

Kuznicki, Natalie P.

Phase separation of stable oil-in-water and water-in-oil emulsions poses major challenges for a variety of industries, including the petroleum industry. The stability and destabilizing of petroleum emulsions highly depend on interfacial properties such as surface/interfacial charges, interfacial...

Fall 2019

Zhu, Yeling

Surface mining followed by Clark’s hot water bitumen extraction (HWBE) process has been employed in the current mineable oil sands industry for massive bitumen production. This method is faced with numerous challenges such as high energy consumption, limited bitumen quality, production from...

Spring 2019

Qiao, Peiqi

Asphaltenes are polyaromatic compounds present in crude oils, which are defined as being soluble in aromatic solvents and insoluble in n−alkanes. The partition of self−associated asphaltene aggregates at oil−solid and oil−water interfaces is the root cause of a number of major problems...

Spring 2013

Wang, Louxiang

As one of the most critical steps to recover valuable particles from a slurry using flotation, knowledge of the drainage of the thin liquid film between an air bubble and a solid surface is required. The main focus of this thesis is to develop and use an integrated thin film drainage appratus...

Fall 2011

Chan, Margo Chi Wing

A cationic thermal sensitive polymer, polyN-isopropylacrylamide-co-N-[3-(Dimethylamino)propyl]methacrylamide (CP) of different molar ratios, known as CP05 and CP10 was synthesized in-house. By doping aluminum hydroxide (Al(OH)3) colloids into CP during the polymerization process, a novel hybrid...

Spring 2011

Wu, Chendi

Understanding the mechanism of bubble-particle interactions plays a critical role in advancing flotation technology. In this study, submicron size bubbles with an average diameter less than 1 μm and a life time of at least several hours were generated using a novel hydrodynamic cavitation method....

Spring 2020

Lu, Yi

Interfacial properties at the oil-water interface are of key importance to various operations in the petroleum industry, especially in the aqueous-based heavy oil recovery process. However, different operation stages often require different interfacial properties, which could be conflicted with...

Spring 2014

Klein, Colin G

In bitumen recovery from oil sands, a percentage of the bitumen is lost to tailings. The effect of fugitive bitumen on fines settling and consolidation in tailings ponds remains controversial. In the current study, the settling performance of mature fine tailings (MFT) in response to flocculant...

Spring 2011

Xie, Jinggang

A Surface Forces Apparatus (SFA) was used in this study to investigate the fundamental surface forces in oil sand processing research. Asphaltene coated surfaces were chosen as the research topic due to the critical role of asphaltenes in oil sands processing, from bitumen extraction, froth...