Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The Canadian oil sands industry is playing an important role in guaranteeing the national fuel self-sufficiency for the present and foreseeable future. However, severe wear of oil sands operation facilities, e.g., erosion of oil sands slurry pumps and pipelines, erosion of cyclones in bitumen recovery, abrasion of oil sands mining machinery, and erosion-corrosion of oil refining facilities, has very negative impact on the oil sands industry, resulting in extremely high cost for repair and replacement of worn facilities as well as large lost production. Development of high-performance wear-resistant materials is always one of strategic R&D areas of high priority in the oil sands industry. During past two years, the applicant's group conducted considerable research (phase-one), in collaboration with Suncor Energy Inc., to develop new high-Cr cast irons (HCCIs) based on a new concept of high-entropy microstructure. A conventional alloy is made by alloying one base element with other minor elements. The high-entropy concept challenges the conventional principle by fabricating a multi-element alloy without a base element. In the phase-one research, a number of trial experiments turned out that the original high-entropy concept had to be modified to suit the HCCIs, mainly due to the toughness issue although a high-entropy alloy could be much harder. We then fabricated a large number of hybrid high-entropy alloys by modifying HCCIs with strong carbide-forming elements while still keeping iron as the base element. The hybrid HCCIs have been demonstrated very promising but their toughness needs to be improved for a wider range of applications. Based on gained experience from the phase-one work, approaches for toughness improvement are proposed. Suncor has approved to continue supporting the proposed research with increased cash and in-kind contributions. The objectives of this phase-two project are 1) to further improve the hybrid HCCIs with emphasis on the increase in toughness, 2) to work with the industrial partner to make the new HCCIs commercializable; 3) to train young professionals for the oil sands industry and other relevant technical sectors.