Flocculation of a Kaolin Clay Slurry by Utilizing Specified Risk Material
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The oil sands are a vital part of the provincial economy in Alberta and oil production in this sector produces large amounts of waste called tailings. The tailings consist of a slurry of clay suspended in process water with residual bitumen present. Reclamation of the land that the tailings ponds occupy is of great concern to the province and the oil producers. One strategy to consolidate this material is to facilitate separation of the solids from the liquid phase using a chemical called a flocculant. Traditional flocculants may not be environmentally sustainable and other alternatives have been sought after. To this end, a waste resource of biological origin called specified risk materials (SRM) has the potential for use in this application. Specified risk materials are waste proteins from the rendering of cattle that have the potential to contain prion diseases, such as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (mad cow disease). Currently, this material is being land-filled or incinerated and is an economic burden to the industry as well as a liability to the local environment. To first make this material safe to use, it must first be hydrolyzed into its molecular components; peptides. These peptides can then be used in various applications and can also be chemically modified to alter its properties. In this work, peptides derived from hydrolyzed SRM were tested as a flocculant in a model kaolin clay system. The peptides were then chemically modified using two different approaches. The first modification was an esterification reaction with methanol to modify the functional groups of the peptides. The second modification was a crosslinking reaction with glutaraldehyde to increase the molecular weight of the peptides. The flocculation performance of the modified peptides was tested in flocculation experiments and was compared to the unmodified version. Characterization analyses were also conducted on the various peptide products including Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA), carboxylic acid titration, sodium dodecyl sulphate gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE), high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and elemental analysis. To summarize, hydrolyzed SRM peptides can act as a flocculant in this model system. Modification of this material by crosslinking with glutaraldehyde improves the flocculation performance of the peptides in this system and is recommended for future use in real world tailing consolidation applications. The characterization tests confirmed that the crosslinking reaction was occurring as theoretically expected. The use of this material could provide a biodegradable alternative to the synthetic polymers used in the industry, while also providing a source of nitrogen for plant growth during reclamation. This has the potential to convert an economic and environmental burden into a material that could benefit the environment by aiding in the reclamation of oil sand tailing ponds.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 it