In the development of a non-aqueous bitumen extraction process, a major obstacle is solvent loss due to hydrocarbon attachment to the reject sand grains. A proposed
solution to this problem is to wash (i.e. remediate) the oil-contaminated sand grains with water and surfactants. This research is focused on developing a protocol to
evaluate the performance of particular surfactant types and water chemistry; emphasis was placed on using minimal amounts of water to recover the residual oil.
To start, a series of jar tests were conducted (using heptane and hexadecane as solvents)to study the phase behaviours of oil-water-surfactant ternary systems. This
was followed by the development of a new washing protocol for the purpose of evaluating remediation performance. Finally, the correlation between overall remediation
performance and the oil-water interfacial tension was discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:AEU.10048/1043 |
| Date | 06 1900 |
| Creators | Mani, Farnaz |
| Contributors | Yeung, Tony (Chemical and Material Engineering), Liu, Qi (Chemical and Material Engineering), Liu, Yang (Civil and Environmental Engineering) |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 1052630 bytes, application/pdf |
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