Department of Chemical Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia.
Annu Rev Chem Biomol Eng. 2013;4:239-57. doi: 10.1146/annurev-chembioeng-061312-103347. Epub 2013 Mar 27.
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.
世界资源产业是最大的废物产生者之一。这些废物中的很大一部分是以细颗粒泥浆的形式产生的，这些泥浆被泵送储存区域，通常浓度较低，在那里泥浆表现得像牛顿流体。从泥浆中简单地去除、再利用和回收水是朝着该行业更可持续的实践迈出的一步。由于脱水导致泥浆浓度增加，材料表现出非牛顿行为，其特征为剪切变稀、屈服应力，在某些情况下还表现出触变行为。资源产业中这种高浓度、不理想（脏）的悬浮液意味着需要新的流变学方法和技术来测量和解释基本的流动特性。此外，一些较旧的经验技术需要以更基本的方式进行修改和解释，以便可以将结果用于设计。本文回顾了这些技术，并说明了行业本身是如何推动其发展的。了解和利用这种流变学已经导致一些行业的废物处理策略取得了显著的改进，但许多行业未能采用现有的技术。本文讨论了其原因。文章最后认为，在未来，由于公众认知、更严格的监管以及甚至可能是常识性的生命周期核算等因素的推动，废物管理实践将会发生更大的积极变化。
