Grant: Alliance Grants

Hydrotransport pipelines are used in oil sands industry to simultaneously ablate lumps, and transport and condition oil sands ore before bitumen extraction. Water flushing the pipeline is essential for pipe cleaning, safe operation and clogging presentation. An enormous volume of clean water is required to remove the oil sands slurry from the pipeline, leading to high cost from the flushing operation. This project will develop computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models to simulate and analyze the process of flushing oil sands slurry in hydrotransport pipeline at high flow velocity. The validated models that can predict the flushing efficiency for a range of particle size distribution, pipe inner diameters by using water with and without microbubbles. The oil sands industry will benefit from the predictive models, as the models can be used to assist optimization of flushing technology with reduced consumption of water. Efficient use of flushing water to achieve the same cleaning purpose will bring tangible economic and environmental benefits for oil sands industry, including reduced greenhouse gas emission and reduced load for utilities that are used to produce warm flushing water, and reduced inventory to tailing ponds. This three-year project will provide excellent training opportunities for three co-op students, two PhD students and a postdoctoral fellow through close engagement with industrial partner.