Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

With the third-largest proven crude oil reserve in the world, the Alberta/Canadian oil sand industry is playing an important role in guaranteeing the national fuel self-sufficiency. However, the high cost of extracting oil from oil sand makes this industry vulnerable to oil price fluctuations, which trembles the national economy, evidenced by the impact of current oil price drop on Canadian economy. Such a situation must be changed through reducing the high cost of oil sand production in order to increase resistance of Canadian economy to oil-shock. One of large costs in oil sand operation comes from repair and replacement of worn components in oil sand slurry transport system, e.g., slurry pumps. Although significant efforts have been made to develop strong materials, success is limited since there is lack of sound guidelines for material design and control towards effective manufacturing. This proposed work is aimed at high-performance high-Cr cast irons (HCCIs) for oil sand slurry transport. The applicant's group has carried out extensive research on new HCCIs in collaboration with Suncor, which have demonstrated exceptional performance. However, two main issues exist when the materials are considered for realistic applications, which are 1) high composition sensitivity i.e., minor changes in composition cause large variations in material performance; and 2) composition inhomogeneity under industrial casting condition makes it difficult to duplicate microstructures developed in laboratory. Thus, it is crucial to scale up the sample size with desired properties. Otherwise, the developed HCCIs cannot be realistically utilized and the investment from industry and government would not receive anticipated return. This project is proposed to further optimize the new HCCIs with focus on reducing the compositional sensitivity through multi-level control and investigating size effect of ingot on composition/microstructure homogeneity in order to have the optimized HCCIs producible on industrial scale with sound guidelines for process control and effective applications.