Experimental study on bi-phase flow Air-Oil in Water Emulsion

Bi-phase slug flow oil-in-water emulsion [5\%-20\%] and air through a horizontal pipe (inner diameter 22mm) is experimentally studied. A test with water and air has been performed as comparison. First we create and analyze the flow pattern map to identify slug flow liquid and air inlet conditions. Flow maps are similar for all the used liquid. A video analysis procedure using an high speed camera has been created to obtain all the characteristics of unit slugs: slug velocity, slug length, bubble velocity, bubbles length and slug frequency. We compare translational velocity and frequency with models finding a good agreement. We calculate the pdfs of the lengths to find the correlations between mean values and STD on different air and liquid superficial velocities. We also perform pressure measurements along the pipe. We conclude that the percentage of oil-in- water has no influence on results in terms of velocity, lengths, frequency and pressure drop.