The development of a vibrating wire viscometer and a microwave cavity resonator for the measurement of viscosity, dew points, density, and liquid volume fraction at high temperature and pressure.

Abstract

This thesis describes the development and testing of two apparatuses; a vibrating wire viscometer to measure the viscosity of fluids over a wide range of temperature and pressure; and a microwave cavity resonator to measure dew points, gas phase densities, and liquid drop out volumes. Viscosity and density of downhole fluids are very important properties as their values can determine the economic viability of a petroleum reservoir. A vibrating wire viscometer has been developed with an electrically insulating tensioning mechanism. It has been used with two wires, of diameters (0.05 and 0.150) mm, to measure the viscosity of methylbenzene and two reference fluids with viscosities of (10 and 100) mPa·s at T = 298 K and p = 0.1 MPa, at temperatures in the range (298 to 373) K and pressures up to 40 MPa, where the viscosity covers the range (0.3 to 100) mPa·s, with a standard uncertainty < 0.6 %. The results differ from literature values by < ±1 %. The results demonstrate that increasing the wire diameter increases the upper operating viscosity range of the vibrating wire viscometer, a result anticipated from the working equations. For the microwave cavity resonator, the method is based on the measurements of the resonance frequency of the lowest order inductive-capacitance mode. The apparatus is capable of operating at temperatures up to 473 K and pressures below 20 MPa. This instrument has been used to measure the dew pressures of {0.4026CH4 + 0.5974C3H8} at a temperature range from 315 K up to the cricondentherm ˜ 340 K. The measured dew pressures differ by less than 0.5 % from values obtained by interpolation of those reported in the literature, which were determined from measurements with experimental techniques that have quite different potential sources of systematic error than the radio-frequency resonator used here. Dew pressures estimated from both NIST 14 and the Peng-Robinson equation of state lie within < ±1 % of the present results at temperature between (315 and 337) K while predictions obtained from the Soave-Redlich-Kwong cubic equation of state deviate from our results by 0.4 % at T = 315 K and these differences increase smoothly with increasing temperature to be -2.4 % at T = 337 K. Densities derived from dielectric permittivity measurements in the gas phase lie within < 0.6 % of the values calculated from the Soave-Redlich-Kwong cubic equation of state and about 1 % from values obtained with the Harvey and Prausnitz correlation based on a mixture reduced density. The calculations with Kiselev and Ely parametric crossover equation of state (based on Patel-Teja EOS) gave deviations < 0.7 %. Liquid volume fractions, in the 2-phase region, were measured from (0.5 to 7) cm3 in a total volume of about 50 cm3 at different isochors. The measured liquid volume fractions differ from values obtained with the Soave-Redlich-Kwong cubic equation of state by between 0 and 3 % at T < 326 K and about 8 % on approach to the critical region. The large deviations observed in the critical region were anticipated because of the known poor performance of the cubic equations of state with regard to the calculation of the liquid density in the vicinity of the critical temperature.