Determination Of Oil Content And Preliminary Study On Separation Of Oil Sand

With the rapid development of modern technology and the increase of population, the development of science and improvement of people’s life quality all causes the tense demand of energy. At present, people are facing the conventional energy crisis,because of the mass development and utilization conventional source of energy. This will prompt people to pay attention to exploit the unconventional source of energy.Therefore, the study on exploitation and utilization of unconventional energy is becoming more and more important. It is known, fossil oil is a kind of the most used conventional sources of energy, but the reserve of fossil oil is limited. However, oil sand is one of unconventional sources of energy, if it can be developed and used widely, that will be benefit for solution of the enery crisis which people will be faced with.In this paper, the properties of oil sand were characterized by XRD, IR, etc, oil content of oil sand was determined at optimum experiment conditions. Moreover, the separation of oil sand with surface active agents were studied.Firstly, smaller grains of oil sand were obtained through a crush. Then the character of oil sand were analyzed, such as the component of sand and pitch both obtained by separation of oil sand. The results of characterization would be benefit for understanding properties of oil sand and giving us some helpful advice about separation of oil sand.Secondly, the method of Dean-Stark determination of oil content was improved, the effects of experiment conditions on determination of oil content were investigated and the oil content of oil sand sample used in this paper was determined under optimum operation conditions.Thirdly, some kinds of appropriate surfactants were studied on separation of oil sand, the effects of experiment conditions on separation were investigated including temperature, time of separation, concentration and volume of surfactants solution. The wash oil rate was employed to estimate predominance of sufactants in separation of oil sand,and the best surfactant was selected.Separation of oil sand using surfactant solution described in this paper is better than other methods of separation oil sands, the remarkable advantages of the method are the decrease corrosion of equipment and environmental friendly. Therefore it is suitable for sustainable development of economic.At last, the best surfactant was compounded with an amphiphilic polymer synthesized by our team, and the compound system was used for separation of oil sands. The results indicted that the effect of separation used compound system was enhanced obviously, the best wash oil rate was 94.6%.