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Fall 2017

Wang, Chen

Rapid, efficient and economical water removal from fluid fine tailings represents a major challenge to many industries, including mineral processing, food processing, waste water treatment and oil sands extraction. In the absence of large-scale fine tailings processing facilities, there will be...

Fall 2010

Salehi, Mohammadreza

Continuous accumulation of Mature Fine Tailings (MFT) is a major challenge to oil sands industry. To reduce the inventory of MFT through development of novel tailings treatment technologies, it is essential to understand the stabilization mechanism of fine solids in MFT. This project aims at...

Fall 2015

Liang, Yin

In previous studies, nontoxic and biodegradable ethylcellulose (EC) was shown to be capable of breaking water-in-diluted bitumen emulsions. Nevertheless, the demulsification mechanism of EC has not been correlated to its effect on the physical properties of stabilizing interfacial asphaltene...

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...

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...

Fall 2012

Ma, Yuan

Two major kinds of natural surfactants are released during oil sands extraction: carboxylic acids (naphthenic acids) and sulfonic acids. In this study, commercial surfactants were used as standards to establish the suitable analytical methods with optimized experimental and instrumental...

Spring 2012

Flury, Christopher T.

To understand the role of caustic addition and its effect on the bitumen extraction process, a novel flow cell and a Denver Cell extraction unit were utilized. This allowed for the comparison of sodium hydroxide and ammonium hydroxides effect on real oil sands ores. Several ores (A1, C-ore,...

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...

Fall 2014

Rafie Borujeny, Elham

Interactions of finely dispersed abrasive particles in chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) slurries play a vital role in determining the polishing performance. In this study, coupled influence of hydrodynamic and colloidal interactions on the attachment of nanosized ceria (CeO2) particles to...

Fall 2010

Yang, Fan

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of solvent addition to bitumen froth on the wettability of froth solids. The wettability of solids determines the transportation/partitioning of the solids between phases, which in turn affects the solids and water rejection in a Clark hot...