Experimental investigation of high viscosity oil-air intermittent flow

In this work, we investigated experimentally the flow of high viscosity-oil (0.9 Pa s) and gas in a horizontal and inclined pipe providing new data-sets on high-viscosity oil multiphase pipe flows that include experimental pressure drops, bubble frequencies and lengths, holdups measured using capacitance probes. All the experimental results are compared to models or correlations present in the literature and widely used, and validated, for low-viscosity liquids multiphase flows. The main conclusion is that correlation available in literature (validated and extensively tested for the low viscosity liquid case) cannot be extended to the high viscosity case.