Development of success criteria for high density fluid fine tailings flocculation in the oil sand industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Syncrude Canada Ltd. is currently developing multi-pronged technologies to treat its legacy fluid fine tailings (FFT). FFT centrifugation, thin-lift and thick-lift (Accelerated Dewatering with rim ditch) are three key technologies. They all require proper mixing and flocculation of high density FFT with a polymeric flocculant. It was found that the previously developed criteria to determine the flocculation performances for the well-diluted tailings systems used in thickeners were not valid for the flocculation of high density FFT due to high viscosity of FFT. The success criteria for high density FFT flocculation were identified as a technical gap that must be closed before FFT centrifuge commercialisation. This paper deals with the development of the success criteria to benchmark the mixing and flocculation performances of high density FFT. The instruments and methodologies used to determine the success criteria will be presented and discussed. It was concluded that four criteria, i.e. yield stress, capillary suction time (CST), lab centrifuge index and visual floc structures of the flocculated materials, were successfully established to determine the performances of high density FFT flocculation. These four criteria are all related to each other. Yield stress indicates the strength of the flocculated material, CST shows the relative dewatering capacity, the lab centrifuge index quickly determines the processibility of solids-liquid separation at a given centrifugal force and time, and the floc structures visually demonstrate the floc sizes and networks. In general, for a good flocculation the flocculated material exhibits a higher yield stress, a lower CST, a clearer centrifuge centrate, and a larger visual floc size. They are just vice versa for a poor flocculation of high density FFT. A few case studies will be used to verify the applicability of the four criteria for high density FFT flocculation. These criteria have been used to gauge the FFT flocculation performances in Syncrude 2010 and 2011 FFT centrifuge pilot tests.
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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".