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Record W4410233051 · doi:10.1016/j.ceja.2025.100767

Cellulose nanocrystals as a rheology modifier in the processing of ultramafic nickel ores

2025· article· en· W4410233051 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueChemical Engineering Journal Advances · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicMinerals Flotation and Separation Techniques
Canadian institutionsUniversity of AlbertaUniversity of Toronto
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaUniversity of Toronto
KeywordsNickelRheologyUltramafic rockNanocrystalMaterials scienceCelluloseChemical engineeringPolymer scienceNanotechnologyMetallurgyComposite materialGeochemistryGeologyEngineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Rheological behaviors, such as high viscosity and yield stress of suspensions, present tremendous challenges during comminution, flotation, and dewatering in the processing of low-grade nickel ores. Owing to the presence of anisotropic serpentine, particle–particle interactions that are attractive in nature can lead to high yield stresses, which increases the energy costs for pumping slurry suspensions. In this study, we investigated the rheological behavior of low-grade ultramafic nickel ore suspensions at varying dosages of cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) at solid densities of 30, 40, and 50 wt.%. Based on the CNC dosage, the serpentine interparticle interaction resulted in aggregation at dosages of 0, 0.1, and 1.0 mg/g CNC and dispersion at dosages of 2.5 mg/g, for slurry concentrations of 30, 40, and 50 wt.%. The viscosity at 1s -1 shear rate for 30 wt.% suspension increased from 0.12 Pa.s to 0.18 Pa.s on increasing the dosage from 0 to 1 mg/g CNC and then decreased to 0.10 Pa.s at 2.5 mg/g CNC dosage. The rheology effect by CNC was more pronounced for higher solid density such as 50 wt.%., where the viscosity increased from 2.74 to 4.42 Pa.s and then decreased to 2.3 Pa.s. This dual effect of CNCs on the rheology of ore can reduce the need for numerous hazardous chemicals used in different unit operations during nickel processing. This study paves the way for CNC to be used as post-processing flocculants for tailings management, which is one of the major environmental concerns faced by the mining and mineral processing industry.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.030
Threshold uncertainty score0.214

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.005
GPT teacher head0.251
Teacher spread0.246 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it