Viscosity and contact angle prediction of low water-containing heavy crude oil diluted with light oil

Numerous viscosity predicting models for mixed crude oil at various operating conditions had been established and widely applied in oil industry, but little attention was paid on the mixed viscosity of heavy or extra-heavy oil with a certain amount of water diluted with light oil in crude oil gathering and transportation system. In this paper, a new model in terms of temperature, dilution ratio and water cut is developed for predicting the viscosity of watery heavy oil blended with light oil, while the relationships between the viscosity and contact angle on the pipe wall are also studied. The proposed viscosity and contact angle models are validated against the experimental data over a wide range of test conditions. The comparison results demonstrate that the predictive capability of the two models is reasonably good for most of the tested data with average absolute error of 11.29% and 13.38%, respectively.