Method and instruments to measure dynamic viscosity of oil products in pipeline

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new method to determine the dynamic viscosity of oil products in a pipeline. Its main difference in comparison with the existing methods is that the viscosity can be determined directly in the pipeline, which allows excluding the human factor that occurs, when using the existing methods and measuring instruments, and improving the accuracy of measuring the dynamic viscosity of oil products due to taking into account the cavitation processes inside a pipeline. The gist of a new method lies in the fact that the rotating element -an ellipse that has the form of a spindle -is placed inside a pipeline in a horizontal position and set in motion by an asynchronous electric motor. Determination of the dynamic viscosity of oil products is carried out by measuring the moment of fluid resistance against the motion of an asynchronous electric motor: the higher the dynamic viscosity, the greater the moment of resistance is developed when the ellipse rotates. The main criteria for estimating the dynamic viscosity of oil products are the moment of inertia of the rotating masses of the drive mechanism and their angular accelerations. The developed hardware-software complex with a rotation angle sensor allows registering and processing the measured parameters. The experimental data obtained in the course of the study demonstrated sufficient convergence of the dynamic viscosity values obtained by the developed method and by the existing methods. In future, it is planned to obtain the dependences of the moments of resistance of various types of oil products on the angular velocity of an asynchronous electric motor and, based on the results obtained, determine the range of speeds, at which the greatest measurement accuracy is achieved.