To better understand bitumen conditioning stage in oil sands extraction process a flow cell was designed to study bitumen liberation directly from sand grains, using real oil sand ore. A high-grade oil sand ore was subjected to various water temperatures and pH values to examine the bitumen liberation. The effect of weathering of the high-grade ore and the presence of salt in the water were also examined to evaluate their effect on bitumen liberation.
Bitumen liberation was found to be critically and proportionately dependent on solution (water) temperature and pH values. A high temperature of 46C and pH value of 11.3 promoted fast liberation with a high bitumen liberation. High salt concentration complemented with a high pH value was found to be detrimental to bitumen liberation from a high-grade ore. Overall, this novel setup provided distinct, high quality images and interesting results, which aided in understanding the critical parameters behind bitumen liberation from an oil sand ore. / Chemical Engineering
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:AEU.10048/1606 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | SrinivasaRajagopalan, Sundeep |
| Contributors | Xu, Zhenghe (Chemical and Materials Engineering), Masliyah, Jacob (Chemical and Materials Engineering), Szymanski, Jozef (Civil and Environmental Engineering) |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 4250732 bytes, application/pdf |
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