Predicting viscosity of nonpolar mixtures as a function of temperature and pressure from volumetric and optical measurements performed at ambient conditions

Abstract

Many commonly used compositional viscosity models require modeling parameters for an equation of state to make prediction. With the recent development of the Evangelista and Vargas correlations (Evangelista and Vargas, Fluid Phase Equilibria, 2018) that predict the critical properties for nonpolar hydrocarbons, a new methodology for predicting viscosities with simple volumetric or optical measurements performed at ambient conditions becomes feasible. Therefore, this study evaluated the proposed methodology on 13 pure components and 11 mixtures and found that their viscosities at various temperatures and pressures can be predicted with an AAPD of 10 and 8.9, respectively. The predictive capabilities of the proposed method are compared against those of current techniques, which require more input data. Our methodology offers predictive capability with a similar level of accuracy with the added benefit of significantly reducing the requirement of input data. The proposed approach uses simple laboratory tests only, which eliminated the need for laborious experiments such as composition analysis or viscosity measurements at high temperature and pressure, providing a significantly more viable option than existing techniques for viscosity estimation.