Experimental Characterization of Admittance Meter With Crude Oil Emulsions

Introduction

Admittance measurement is used in the food industry as a form of quality control (Mabrook and Petty, 2003, 2002), revealing insight regarding the electrical behavior of solids or liquids substances. Likewise, the electrical parameters of different water samples are determined using capacitance and resistance (Golnabi, 2011). Capacitance has been widely used in the study of fluids having different permittivity values (Strazza et al., 2011; Tollefsen and Hammer, 1998) and to measure various parameters associated with emulsions (Pal, 1994; Burrus, 1966). There are previous developments that have been made to measure and characterize emulsions which have been given different applications such as characterizing dynamic separation (Jaworski and Dyakowski, 2005); in the measurement of void fraction in steam/water flow (Jaworek, Krupa, and Trela, 2004) and measuring water content (Perini et al., 2012; Daqing, Haijun, and Hetang 1997; García-Golding et al., 1995). The relative permittivity or dielectric constant has the effect to move slightly the electric charges which creates sets of electric dipoles (Mohamad et al., 2011). This relative permittivity of the fluid varies its composition when subjected to an external electric field, in the same way that changes the capacitance of the sensor according to the content of liquid in the sample (Wenfeng et al., 2012). In previously works, Quing et al. (2018) reported that the impedance characteristics of oil–water emulsions can be considered as an effective method to characterize the water content in oil-water emulsions. Ferrerira et al. (2017) develop a conductivity and capacitance sensor that provide information about volume fraction and separation time; and they expect in future works to obtain relevant information, for example droplets’ average diameters, about emulsion. In addition, Perini et al. (2012) show that with impedance spectra, they obtained that time constant of W/O emulsions increases with an increase of the water content, which is an emulsion characteristic that can be applied to an analysis of the electrostatic demulsification of water-in-oil emulsions. Goual (2009) in his study of impedance spectroscopy in petroleum fluids reported that low-frequency measurements can produce sensor responses that are sensitive to interactions between some petroleum components and surfactants. Similarly, conductance measurement has been great interest in the oil industry as it is used among other things for the measurement records in production wells. For this purpose, studies have been conducted with arrays of sensors for measuring conductance in horizontal wells (Hao and Wu, 2013) as well as for measuring two-phase flow in horizontal wells (Hayt and Buck, 2006).