Viscosity Variation of Water-in-Oil Emulsions With Water Volume Fraction

When an immiscible liquid phase is dispersed in a continuous phase, emulsion will appear. In the oil industry water-in-oil emulsions are very common which can be formed spontaneously during crude oil production. According to this fact, the transportation and processing of emulsions become increasingly common in the petroleum industry. Generally, water-in-oil emulsions, especially those prepared from light oils, exhibit Newtonian behavior. However, water-in-heavy oil emulsions exhibit non-Newtonian behavior even at low water contents. Up to now, several models have been proposed for the behavior of emulsions viscosity. In this study, we have done experiments to observe the viscosity of different emulsion samples with different water fractions. Then we have used the experimental data to propose an equation for the data trend line.

Keywords:

Emulsion , Water Content , Behavior Modeling