Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Rheology of Slurries and Environmental Impacts in the Mining Industry

Rheology of Slurries and Environmental Impacts in the Mining Industry The world's resource industries are the largest producers of waste. Much of this waste is produced as a fine particle slurry, which is pumped to a storage area, generally at a low concentration, where it behaves like a Newtonian fluid. Simply removing, reusing, and recycling water from the slurry represents a step toward a more sustainable practice in this industry. As the concentration of such a slurry is increased as a result of dewatering, the materials exhibit non-Newtonian behavior, which is characterized by shear thinning, a yield stress, and in some instances thixotropic behavior. Such high-concentration, nonideal (dirty) suspensions in the resource industries have meant that new rheological methods and techniques have been needed to measure and interpret the basic flow properties. Also, some older empirical techniques have needed to be modified and interpreted in a more fundamental way so that the results could be used in design. This article reviews these techniques and illustrates how the industry itself has motivated their development. Understanding and exploiting this rheology has resulted in dramatic improvement in the waste-disposal strategy for some industries, but many have failed to embrace the available technology. The reasons for this are discussed. The article concludes that a greater positive change in waste-management practice will occur in the future, motivated by several factors, including public perception, tighter regulation, and perhaps even commonsense life cycle accounting. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Annual Review of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Annual Reviews

Rheology of Slurries and Environmental Impacts in the Mining Industry

Download PDF
19 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/annual-reviews/rheology-of-slurries-and-environmental-impacts-in-the-mining-industry-2JfzqMYhAH

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Annual Reviews
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved
ISSN
1947-5438
eISSN
1947-5446
DOI
10.1146/annurev-chembioeng-061312-103347
pmid
23540291
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The world's resource industries are the largest producers of waste. Much of this waste is produced as a fine particle slurry, which is pumped to a storage area, generally at a low concentration, where it behaves like a Newtonian fluid. Simply removing, reusing, and recycling water from the slurry represents a step toward a more sustainable practice in this industry. As the concentration of such a slurry is increased as a result of dewatering, the materials exhibit non-Newtonian behavior, which is characterized by shear thinning, a yield stress, and in some instances thixotropic behavior. Such high-concentration, nonideal (dirty) suspensions in the resource industries have meant that new rheological methods and techniques have been needed to measure and interpret the basic flow properties. Also, some older empirical techniques have needed to be modified and interpreted in a more fundamental way so that the results could be used in design. This article reviews these techniques and illustrates how the industry itself has motivated their development. Understanding and exploiting this rheology has resulted in dramatic improvement in the waste-disposal strategy for some industries, but many have failed to embrace the available technology. The reasons for this are discussed. The article concludes that a greater positive change in waste-management practice will occur in the future, motivated by several factors, including public perception, tighter regulation, and perhaps even commonsense life cycle accounting.

Journal

Annual Review of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering – Annual Reviews

Published: Jun 7, 2013

There are no references for this article.