In the extraction process of oil sands, synthetic crude oil and large volumes of waste

materials known as oil sands tailings, which are made up of sands, clay, water, silts,
residual bitumen, and other hydrocarbons, salts, and trace metals are produced (Allen,
2008; Bedair, 2013).

These materials are then stored in manufactured tailings storage facilities and are
managed due to their different settling rates in water. Like sand particles that settle
quickly and fines (clay and silt) that tend to remain suspended in the water forming FFT
(fine fluid tailings)

As FFT are by-products of the oil sands bitumen extraction process, it can take decades
to settle without intervention due to the small size of particles suspended in the water.
Thus, FFT became a challenge to the oil sands mining industry. For FFT are required to
be managed to create a sustainable terrain for mine closure.

In line with this, a variety of technologies for the fluid tailings treatment and deposition
including thin lift drying, thickened tailings, nonsegregating tailings and composite
tailings, fluid tailings centrifugation, and water-capped tailings were developed (Alberta
Energy Regulator (AER)., 2019).

Among them, freeze-thaw dewatering was recognized as a potentially inexpensive

technique for dewatering oil sands tailings by the research study as the average
temperature of the setting for treating sand tailing was much in favor of the treatment
method.

Moreover, laboratory and pilot scales showed that both untreated FFT and chemical-
amended FFT samples experienced significant dewatering through multiple freeze-thaw
cycles.

It is also important to take note that the freeze-thaw effects are influenced by various
factors such as mode of freezing , number of freeze-thaw cycles , freezing rate,
dimensionality of freezing, sample size, and physicochemical interactions.

In this study, a time- and cost-effective freeze-thaw method was developed to simulate
the thin lift drying process on a small laboratory scale under a three-dimensional closed
freezing condition.

The samples in this study were not insulated so were frozen from all around their sides.
The dimensionality of temperature gradient and depth of sample were not prioritized as
the objective was to test whether differences due to treatment could be observed in
rapid bench-scale tests.

This paper aims to address the impact of freeze thaw effects by four types of treatments
on FFT: coagulation using an inorganic coagulant, flocculation using a polymeric
flocculant, simulated conveyance, and desiccation point prior to freeze-thaw.
Additionally, a commercially available alum solution was used as a coagulant and an
anionic polyacrylamide, polymer NRG1000, was used as the flocculant. The treated
FFT was also sheared to simulate the field pipeline conveyance process.

Four major factors on the FFT dewatering by freeze-thaw were investigated: coagulant
addition, polymer dosage, shearing, and clay-to-water ratio (CWR) desiccation point
prior to freezing. In the end, the thickness of the adsorbed water layer on the surfaces of
clay minerals, named water layer index was introduced to evaluate the tailings
management performance.