Brewster Angle Microscopy of Langmuir Films of Athabasca Bitumens, <i>n</i>-C5 Asphaltenes, and SAGD Bitumen during Pressure–Area Hysteresis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bitumen films formed on water surfaces have negative consequences, both environmental and economic. CanmetENERGY has placed considerable research emphasis on understanding the structures of the bitumen films on water as a necessary step before optimization of bitumen extraction. The detailed structures of the adsorbed molecules and, especially, the role of asphaltene molecules at the interfaces are still under scrutiny and debate. In the present study, we compared bitumen and asphaltene films as they were compressed and expanded under various surface pressures in order to achieve a clearer understanding of bitumen film structures. We used a customized NIMA Langmuir trough interfaced to a Brewster angle microscope (BAM) and CCD camera (Nanofilm_ep3BAM, Accurion, previously Nanofilm Gmbh) to study images of bitumen films at the air/water interface. The bitumen film appeared uniform with high reflectivity at a surface pressure of 18 mN·m(-1) and exhibited a coarse pebblelike interface with reduced reflectivity in the liquid condensed (LC) phase at higher pressures (18-35 mN·m(-1)). During the first cycle of compression asphaltene films showed well-defined phase transitions and a uniformly smooth interface in the LC phase between 9 and 35 mN·m(-1). However, folding or buckling occurred at surface pressures from 35 to 44 mN·m(-1). On expansion, asphaltene films appeared to break into islands. The hysteresis of the pressure-area isotherm was much larger for asphaltenes than for bitumen. In both compression and expansion cycles, BAM images for bitumen films appeared to be more reproducible than those of the asphaltene films at the same surface pressures. Films for low-°API SAGD bitumen were almost identical to those for surface-mined bitumen. Films formed from partially deasphalted surface-mined bitumens showed higher compressibility and lower rigidity than the original bitumen. The BAM images illustrated significant differences between the partially deasphalted and original bitumen films. Other components in bitumen also played important roles in determining the interfacial properties of bitumen films.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".