Improvement on the Viscosity Models for the Effects of Temperature and Pressure on the Viscosity of Heavy Crude Oils

With the industrial need for oil creating a growing scarcity of light, transport-efficient oil, a need for more readily transportable heavy crude is being developed. The processes of production and pipeline transportation of heavy crude oil require an understanding of material composition and physical and rheological characteristics, and the changes which occur at different process parameters. Typically this would require a series of expensive and wasteful experiments, done by exposing various crudes to varied processing conditions, such as pressure and temperature, which through exposure produce changes in the oil properties but are overall inefficient. Modeling eliminates these needs as a simple equation can predict heavy crude oil characteristics given parameters of use. This study comparatively examines a new simplistic, semiempirical equation against current empirical models for the viscosity of Tangleflags and Athabasca bitumen. The equation gave values of relatively low percent errors for the effect of temperature and pressure on viscosity based on one viscosity measurement.