Waxy Cooled Crude Oil Characterization by Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT)

• Main Author: Abd Karim, Abd Azim
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS 2012
• Online Access: http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/3966/1/DISSERTATION_%28ABD_AZIM_B_ABD_KARIM_EE11366%29.pdf; http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/3966/

This paper discussed on the project entitled, “Waxy Cooled Crude Oil Characterization by Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT)”. Current research towards the characterizing of the crude oil seems to be sprout positively according to different field of studies that try to fulfill demanded from industrial. As parallel towards this growth, in this project the author reported a study regarding the behavior of gelled crude which is a waxy crude oil which undergoes thermal shrinkage or cooling process. The study is about gathering all possible information about the waxy crude oil for further study which will lead to the result of new correlation for waxy crude oil. The objective of this project to design an Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) sensor for the characterization of cooled waxy crude oil within the pipeline in the static flow condition. Before that, sensor calibration set up must be done for lower and upper range of the material permittivity as the sensor standard detection. For the online measurement, the visualization and other raw measurement in a cross section using multi-electrode capacitance sensor will be observe as the temperature been varied. The result and discussion contain the fabrication result of the ECT sensor like calibration and online measurement, with some discussion about the result obtained which show the temperature is inversely proportional to the raw capacitance of the crude oil. For future work, the experimental procedure will be developed by further test on dynamic flow measurement in order to get another important variable parameter as to get real characterization of the crude oil as in the real industrial situation.