Viscosity of crude-water emulsion?

[KernOily]

I'm at a loss as to which forum to post this in, and Dave will kick my rear end if I cross-post, so I'm starting here...

What do you fellers do when calculating physical and transport properties of crude oil-water emulsions? Specifically, this is a crude oil-produced water emulsion of 13° API heavy sour crude.

I did some rough calcs with my simulator (Pipephase) and I get wildly different numbers for a dp/100' pipe friction loss calc depending on which model I use to determine the emulsion viscosity.

The one that most people use is Woelflin. However, it gives HUGE viscosities with correspondingly huge dP's.

Interestingly, the method which seems to most closely match a lot of the field data I've seen is to calc the properties just using a weighted volumetric average. While not very 'scientific' this seems to give decent results.

Well, I am now in the front-end engineering phase of a plant capacity upgrade in which I need to calc properties for a crude I have not dealt with before. It is 13° and sour, like the ones I have field data for, but who knows whether this one will behave like the others?

Just looking for some ideas and discussion here.

Thanks Guys ~ Pete

Thanks!
Pete