Role of Aqueous Phase Chemistry, Interfacial Film Properties, and Surface Coverage in Stabilizing Water-in-Bitumen Emulsions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Several factors influencing the stability of asphaltene- and bitumen-stabilized water-in-oil emulsions were investigated including salt type, salt concentration, pH, interfacial film properties, surface coverage, drop size, and emulsion packing. Emulsions were prepared from bitumens (and their asphaltenes) from an oil sands mining process, a cyclic steam process, and a steam-assisted gravity drainage process. The aqueous phases consisted of reverse-osmosis water and salts (NaCl, CaCl 2, Na 2 SO 4, KCl, and Na 2 CO 3 ), and the organic phases consisted of 10 g/L asphaltenes (extracted with n -heptane) or crude oil bitumen dissolved in heptane–toluene solutions. The stability of the emulsions was assessed in terms of the percentage of water resolved after repeated treatment cycles involving heating at 60 °C and centrifugation at 3500 rpm. The bitumen–water systems had similar behavior to the asphaltene–water systems, suggesting that the emulsion stabilizers come primarily from the asphaltenes. Irreversibly adsorbed interfacial films were formed in all cases, a condition necessary for mechanical stabilization. Salt contents as low as 0.02 wt % were found to significantly increase the stability of the emulsions. The increase in stability correlated with an increase in the mass and apparent molecular weight of asphaltenes adsorbed at the interface. A mass surface coverage of 5 mg/m 2 and an apparent molecular weight of 7000 g/mol appear to be the threshold required for stable emulsions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".