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CiDRA’s SONARtrac and SMARTring technology provides new insight into fluid rheology, thereby providing slurry management tools and process optimization services previously not seen or experienced in the industry.
Condition-Based Monitoring
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Sand-out Prevention
Interventions and sand-outs occur because of process upsets and are experienced at lower velocities with a slurry of fine and coarse sand content.
When an operator intervenes to prevent a sand-out, bitumen recovery is sacrificed and more water is used. Often times the line sands out causing costly downtime and lost production.
CiDRA’s sand-out prevention services can eliminate interventions and sand-outs by providing an operator an “early warning system” that enables preventative action, thus eliminating costly interventions while maintaining uptime and bitumen recovery levels in addition to conserving a scarce resource – water.
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Over-Sized Rock Detection
Other than physical inspection, there is no way to know when teeth of a crusher wears or breaks, or when a screen wears, thus allowing over-sized rocks to pass through.
Over-sized rocks can get stuck in a pumps impeller causing costly premature repairs and unscheduled shut downs
CiDRA’s over-sized rock detection services provide a threshold for rock-sizes that can provide an early warning system to the operator that mechanical fatigue is occurring with the crushers or rollers. The operator can take preventative action by switching over to “swing” train or scheduling maintenance as necessary.
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Pipe Wall Thickness Wear Prediction
One of the largest single maintenance expense is associated with pipe wear and pipe wall thickness measurements, currently performed manually by reliability and inspection personnel. This is accomplished by measuring tens of thousands of points.
Resulting measurements are highly variable and timeliness is a key issue.
Data collection and translation often is compiled too late for predictive modeling and action. Often times pipe hole-outs and ruptures occur causing potential safety and environmental issues and costly unscheduled downtime.
CiDRA has developed a completely innovative pipe wall thickness measurement and monitoring system called HALOTM. The HALO system is powered by CiDRA’s SMARTring technology.
CiDRA is leveraging its HALO technology to provide permanent fixed wall thickness measurements along the length of the pipeline delivering fast, accurate, repeatable measurements to our customer’s reliability and pipeline integrity teams for predictive modeling and wear characterization of pipelines.
Eliminating measurement of variability and uncertainty, and eliminating the need for scaffolding are the immediate benefits of the HALO service offering. More importantly, the ability to accurately measure and characterize wear in the pipe line, provides immediate cost savings, longer pipe life, mitigation of hole-outs and unscheduled shutdowns.
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Valve and Pump Monitoring
By leveraging SMARTring technology, you can monitor and characterize the health of valves and pumps to predict wear and failure, thereby preventing costly repairs and unscheduled shutdowns.
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Process Optimization Services
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Lump Digestion Analyzer
Understanding the rate of lump digestion can enable an operator to understand the correlation of all the transients that effect bitumen recovery. Understanding the rate of digestion can also help determine the length and configuration of the hydrotransport pipeline, thereby optimizing recoveries and potentially reducing the amount of piping in the hydrotransport line.
CiDRA’s SONARtrac Velocity Profile Analyzer can measure the rate of lump digestion of the oilsands in a hydrotransport line thereby enabling an understanding of slurry rheology never before possible.
The SONARtrac system's ability to measure the amount of air in a hydrotransport line can also help the operator correlate the % of entrained air in a slurry necessary to help control and optimize bitumen liberation.
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Hydrotransport and Tailings Water Conservation
Most hydrotransport and tailings slurries are run conservatively to prevent sanding. This equates to using more water than necessary.
Utilizing the SONARtrac Velocity Profile Analyzer, much like the SONARtrac Sand-Out Prevention System, an operator can potentially operate close to the point of deposition thereby increasing density and reducing velocity.
If density can be increased and velocity decreased, an operator can lower water usage and potentially decrease the rate of pipe wear.
Additional benefits from having the ability to decrease velocity and increasing density in hydrotransport applications can result in better scrubbing and conditioning of the ore, leading to enhanced recoveries. Having this ability in tailings lines also reduces the amount discharged to tailings ponds.
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Entrained Air and Gas Hold-up
Flotation performance is a function of many parameters. Much research and field testing have concluded that critical gas dispersion parameters may be used to control this process (Sb, Eg, Jg, Db).
Until now, making these measurements in real time has not been practical. These measurements have typically been done on a non-real time survey basis;
however, with the Entrained Air and Gas-Holdup Analyzer, we are able to obtain a real-time measurement of Eg and a means to estimate Db and to calculate Sb.
Air rate, chemical injection, washwater, and slurry feed rate may be optimized to minimize cost and maximize recover and or grade.
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For inquiries and pricing information, contact:
John Viega, Oilsands Performance Services
203.626.3373 (office)
860.209.1982 (cell)
jviega@cidra.com
SONARtrac and SMARTring is a trademark of CiDRA.
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