Viscosity of water-in-oil emulsions: Variation with temperature and water volume fraction

Water-in-oil emulsions are important in the petroleum industry in production operations, where the water content of the emulsion can be as high as 60% in volume, also in petroleum refining operations where generally the water content is low. The effective viscosity of water-in-oil emulsions depends mainly on the volume fraction of dispersed phase and temperature, along with several minor effects, such as shear rate, average droplet size, droplet size distribution, viscosity and density of oil. Using six different crude oils, the effective viscosities of several synthetic water-in-oil emulsions are measured at atmospheric pressure using a dynamic viscosimeter for different shear rates, temperatures and volume fractions of the dispersed phase. The ASTM equation, method D-341, for describing viscosity as a function of temperature is extended to include the variation of dispersed phase volume fraction. The proposed equation gives good correlation between the measured viscosities of water-in-oil emulsions as a function of temperature and the volume fraction of water.