Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 188 (2020) 106863

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Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering

journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/petrol

The mechanism of detecting water content in oil-water emulsions using

impedance spectroscopy
Meiyi Qing a, b, Huaqing Liang a, b, *, Jinjun Zhang c, Honglei Zhan d
a
State Key Lab of Petroleum Resources and Prospecting, 102249, Beijing, People’s Republic of China
b
College of Information Science and Engineering, China University of Petroleum-Beijing, 102249, Beijing, People’s Republic of China
c
National Engineering Laboratory for Pipeline Safety/MOE Key Laboratory of Petroleum Engineering/Beijing Key Laboratory of Urban, 102249, Beijing, People’s
Republic of China
d
Beijing Key Laboratory of Optical Detection Technology for Oil and Gas, China University of Petroleum, 102249, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: The water content of the oil-water emulsions has a significant impact on the flow pattern and pressure drop law
Impedance spectroscopy of oil-water two-phase flow, thus more theory and methods are necessary to improve the detection of emulsion.
Water content Impedance spectroscopy was employed to detect oil-water emulsions with different water contents. The diffusion
Oil-water emulsion
frequency extracted from impedance spectroscopy had a linear relationship with the water content of emulsions.
Distribution of droplets
In this study, polarization microscope was used to obtain the microstructure characteristics of oil-water emul­
sions. The increasing water content increased the logarithmic mean size of the droplets in a linear fashion. This
led to an increase in the concentration of charged ions in the diffusion layer of the ionic double layer, which
significantly influenced the time of the diffusion process. Consequently, impedance spectroscopy can be applied
to detect the water content of emulsions and contribute to further understanding the characteristics of multi­
phase flow in petroleum reservation and transportation industry.

been satisfactorily addressed; further research is needed to develop a

more simple and reliable technique that is practical and accurate.
1. Introduction
Impedance spectroscopy technology is widely used in component
analysis of materials in recent years. The technique is based on the
The formation of an oil-water emulsion is a general occurrence in the
measuring the impedance response to obtain the electrical characteris­
transportation of water-cut crude oil. It not only changes the effective
tics of oil–water emulsions in an alternating current (AC) field (Bar­
proportion of oil and water phases in the transported fluids but also
soukov and Macdonald, 2005). Due to the varying portions of the
increases the effective viscosity of the oil-water two-phase system. Based
constituents, oil-water emulsions exhibit varying impedance character­
on this, the water content of the oil-water emulsions has a significant
istics over a frequency range. Therefore, impedance spectroscopy has
impact on the flow pattern and pressure drop law of oil-water two-phase
generally been used as a tool to obtain the constituents and contents of
flow. Therefore, the study of the water content of oil-water two-phase
oil-water mixtures.
systems improves an understanding of the characteristics of multiphase
In a previous study, Jong-Ho et al. (2005) used an impedance
flow (Ahmed et al., 1999; Mohamed et al., 2003; Gamal et al., 2005;
analyzer to investigate the dielectric characteristics of the water in oil
Evdokimov and Losev, 2014).
(W/O) emulsion system. In this study, the linear relationship between
Many investigations have studied the water contents of oil-water
the relaxation time and the salt content in the water phase in the W/O
two-phase systems (Pal, 1994). There are many manual and direct
emulsions was proposed.
techniques has been used to characterize the phase content, such as
Goual (2009) studied the dielectric constant and the conductivity of
distillation, electric dehydration, capacitive, microwave-based, and
Boscan asphaltenes and maltenes, based on the impedance spectroscopy
spectroscopic techniques (Mcclements, 1991; Araujo et al., 2008; Huynh
in a low-frequency range. The results shows the alternating-current (AC)
et al., 2012; Zubair and Tang, 2014). These techniques contribute to
conductivity increases with increasing frequency below the frequency of
online water content measurements. Measuring the water content in the
105 Hz.
oil-water two phase system is a significant challenge that has not yet

* Corresponding author. State Key Lab of Petroleum Resources and Prospecting, 102249, Beijing, People’s Republic of China.
E-mail address: hqliang@cup.edu.cn (H. Liang).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.petrol.2019.106863
Received 24 August 2019; Received in revised form 16 November 2019; Accepted 23 December 2019
Available online 28 December 2019
0920-4105/© 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
M. Qing et al. Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 188 (2020) 106863

Nomenclature
c Time variation of the number density
Cdl Double-layer capacitance
fd Diffusion frequency
J Macroscopic particle flux
Rct Charge transfer resistance
Rs Resistance of the emulsion
Zw Warburg impedance
μ Logarithmic mean of droplets size
σ Standard deviation of droplet size
σw Warburg coefficient
Perini et al. (2012) measured the impedance response of the crude oil
and oil-water emulsions under an AC field in the frequency range of 104
and 107 Hz. The results showed the significant differences of the
impedance spectra between the dehydrated crude oil and emulsion. This
work proposed that the EIS can contribute to analyse the electrostatic
demulsification of water-in-oil emulsions.
Shahidi et al. (2016) focuses on the stability and phase behavior of
oil-water emulsions basing on the electrical impedance spectroscopy
(EIS). The established equivalent circuit contribute to study the capac­
itance and resistance characteristics of emulsions during the phase
separation. It suggested that the EIS can be a effective method to sense
phase separation.
Previous works have demonstrated that impedance spectroscopy can
characterize the constituents and phase content of oil-water emulsions.
Some parameters, such as the relaxation frequency and the equivalent
circuit, were proposed in this method. However, the problem was that
the corresponding theoretical model of the oil-water emulsion system
impedance spectroscopy was not clear and is a deficiency of this method.
In contrast to previous works, this study focused on the characteristics of
the diffusion frequency of emulsions under an AC field. Then, the dis­
tribution of the droplets that determines the diffusion control of the
emulsion system was studied in depth by polarization microscopy.
In this work, the diffusion frequency of the impedance spectroscopy
of the oil-water emulsions with water contents of 2.90–44.40 v/v% are
discussed. The results show a linear relationship between the water
content and the diffusion frequency. In addition, it suggests that the
distribution characteristics of droplets, especially the logarithmic mean
size, are mainly controlled by the water content. The charged ion density
dominated by the size of the droplets determines the time of the diffu­
sion process, which is highly correlated with the water content of the oil-
water emulsion system. Therefore, this study indicates that using
impedance spectroscopy to evaluate the water content in emulsions is an
effective method for crude oil detection.
Table 1
Physical properties of crude oil.
Properties Results
3
20 C Density (kg/m )
�
879.5
Solidification point (� C) 10
Asphaltene content (%) 3.72
Gum content 7.89
Wax content 3.5
50 � C Viscosity (mPa.s) 45.78
Digital Tachometer, IKA Labortechnik, UK), and a digital torque meter
(MR-D Agitator, IKA Labortechnik, UK) (Qing et al., 2018). During the
sampling process, the temperature was kept at 25 � C by a water bath
system (HAAKE AC200 Water Bath, Germany). The torque of the sam­
ples were measured by a digital torque meter (D1-S1 Digital Torque
Meter, IKA Labortechnik, UK). The oil-water mixtures with different
fractions of phase were placed in the sample pool of the stirring appa­
ratus. The stirring apparatus provided stable and continuous a shear
force to the samples, which can realized the emulsification without an
emulsifier. Basing on the previous work, the stable emulsions can be
obtained after 10min mechanical stirring at 500 rpm. For a stable
oil-water emulsion, the torque was maintained at a nearly constant
level, and no layering phenomenon was observed.
2.2. Experimental methods
The stable oil–water emulsions were immediately transferred to a
sample cell with a volume capacity of 40 mL. The cell was a coaxial
double cylindrical electrode of titanium alloy that consisted of an
external electrode and an internal electrode. As shown in Fig. 1(a), the
internal electrode was a solid cylinder with a length of 55.0 mm and a
radius of 41.6 mm. The external electrode was a hollow cylinder with a
length of 75.0 mm and an inner radius of 43.2 mm. There was a spacing

2. Materials and experimental methods

2.1. Materials

The oil-water mixtures used in this work were obtained by mixing

different volume fraction of crude oil to distilled water, with a water
content of 2.90–44.40 v/v%. The National Engineering Laboratory
provided the Beijiang crude oil and distilled water used for Pipeline
Safety (China University of Petroleum, Beijing). The physical properties
of the dehydrated oil samples are shown in Table 1. To eliminate its
shear and thermal histories, the oil sample was placed in a water bath at
80 � C for 2 h and then placed at room temperature (25 � C) in the shade
for 48 h.
The oil-water emulsion samples were produced by a fabricated stir­
ring apparatus, which composed of a designed sample pool, an agitator Fig. 1. (a). The coaxial double cylindrical electrode (b). Schematic diagram of
(MR-D Agitator, IKA Labortechnik, UK), a digital tachometer (RE 162 C the measurement system.

2
M. Qing et al.
of 0.8 mm between the internal and external electrodes.
The measurement system was shown in Fig. 1(b). The sample cell
was placed and fixed into the test table of a torque rheometer system
(Thermo Scientific HAAKE MARS II, Germany), which was connected
with a water bath system (HAAKE AC200 Water Bath, Germany) to
maintain 25 � C during the measurements. The sample cell was con­
nected to a PSM1700 frequency response analyzer (Newtons4th Ltd.,
England) with a frequency range from 10 5 to 106 Hz. A total of 64
point-measurements were performed at a constant voltage level of 2V
and without a DC bias. A frequency sweep from 1 to 5 � 105 Hz was
selected because the impedance spectroscopy of oil-water emulsion in
the frequency range contained the electrical characteristics of oil-water
emulsion based on the observation of the preliminary experiments.
Polarizing microscopy is a conventional method widely used to
directly characterize the microstructure of a material. The droplet dis­
tribution of the oil-water emulsion, including the size and number, was
recorded by a polarizing microscope (Baloch and Hameed, 2005; Tansel
and Sevimoglu, 2006). In this work, a polarizing microscope (OPTI­
PHOT2-POL, Nikon, Japan) was used to observe the microstructure of
the W/O system. The microscope was equipped with a CCD digital
camera (Cool SNAP 3.3 M, Roper Scientific, America). 10 to 15 images
were captured in different regions of each smear sample. The droplets
with clear boundaries were counted and analyzed using NanoMeasure
1.2 software.
3. Results and discussion
3.1. Impedance spectroscopy of emulsions
The impedance of oil-water emulsions were investigated for the
water content in oil. Every impedance includes real and imaginary part
measured by setting relative frequency of AC. The real versus imaginary
part of the impedance of the oil-water emulsions with water contents
from 7.41 to 37.50 v/v% were presented in the Nyquist diagram in Fig. 2
(a). In terms of the Z0 -Z00 curve, there is only one semicircle, which in­
dicates a homogeneous distribution of the time constants of the emul­
sion system. As shown in Fig. 2(b), a constant-phase trend starts to take
place and rapidly becomes dominant, which is shown as the line with a
slope of π/4. It is always considered the Warburg impedance Zw, which is
Fig. 2. (a) Nyquist diagram of emulsions with water content of 7.41–37.50 v/v%. The Z0 and Z00 were the real part and imaginary part of the impedance. (b) The
impedance of low frequency region of the oil-water emulsion with water content of 37.50 v/v%. (c) The equivalent circuit model of oil-water emulsions system.
3
Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 188 (2020) 106863
related to the diffusion process of the emulsion system (Muralidharan,
1997). In this work, the frequency where a semicircle turns into a
straight line on the complex plane is defined as the diffusion frequency
fd. The fd is the highest frequency that diffusion control is dominant
during the conduction this study and is obviously affected by the water
content in the emulsion system.
There is an ionic double-layer at the interface between the electrolyte
fluid and electrode (Grahame, 1947; Bedzyk et al., 1990). The first layer
is dense layer that contains ions adsorbed to the surface of electrode. The
second layer is a rather loose layer that is called diffuse layer. This layer
composed of ions moving diffusively under the electrical circuitry. In an
equivalent electrical circuit, the effect of the accumulation of ions on the
surface of electrode lead to the electrical capacitance effect of the ions
double-layer. The transport resistance effect due to the moving of ions in
the diffuse layer. The capacitance of the double-layer generally be linked
to the dielectric constant of the solution and the thickness of the ions
double-layer. Based on the ionic double-layer theory, a Randles circuit
can be established to describe the impedance response of the emulsion
system in our work. As shown in Fig. 3(c), the equivalent circuit is
composed of a resistor (Rs) in series with a parallel circuit which is
consist of a capacitor (Cdl) and a resistor (Rct) that have a Warburg
impedance Zw. Here, Rs, Rct, and Cdl represent the solution resistance of
the emulsion, double-layer capacitance, and charge transfer resistance,
respectively.
The impedance of the equivalent circuit is:
ZF
Z ¼ Rs þ (1)
1 þ jωCdl ZF
ZF ¼ Zw þ Rct
Here, Zw cannot be mimicked by any combination of resistors and ca­
pacitors, but (Bisquert and Compte, 2001; Shahidi et al., 2016):
σw jσ w
Zw ¼ (2)
ω1=2 ω1=2
The value of σ w is the Warburg coefficient, which is a constant in this
work.
Thus, Eq. (1) can be described as:
M. Qing et al. Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 188 (2020) 106863

squared error of cross-validation (RMSECV) of 0.8% for a regression

between the water content (wt %) and the relative area of the water peak
in the transverse relaxation time (T2) distribution curve. (Zhao et al.,
2019) proposes the dual-frequency correction algorithm to measure the
water content of oil-water two-phase flows. It can be concluded that this
algorithm can effectively eliminate the effect of conductivity on water
content measurement compared to conventional algorithms. Compared
with the methods discussed above, the proposed method in this work
comes up with a lower requires at measuring frequency and time. It
demonstrates that the impedance spectroscopy would contribute to the
simple and practical detection of the water content in oil-water
emulsion.

3.2. Distribution of droplets in emulsions

The proposed linear function indicates that the frequency of the

diffusion process is changed by water content. The water in oil (W/O)
Fig. 3. Diffusion frequency dependence of water contents. The red line repre­ emulsions have different distributions of the droplets with various size
sents the fitting linear function of the fd and water content. R is the correlation and number, indicating different concentration distributions of reactive
coefficient of fitting function. (For interpretation of the references to colour in ions. Moreover, the distribution of charged ions dominates the diffusion
this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.) time of ions in the emulsion system under the AC field.
As shown in the inset in Fig. 4, the significant effect of water content
Rct þ σ w ω 1=2 on the distribution of droplets size was investigated. With the increasing
Z’ ¼ Rs þ 2 1=2 Þ2
water content of emulsions, the mean diameter of water droplets
ðCdl σw ω1=2 þ 1Þ þ C2dl ω2 ðRct þ σ w ω
increased from 3.74 � 0.03 μm to 5.60 � 0.27 μm. For the emulsion with
1=2
� 1=2 1=2
� water content of 7.40 v/v%, the size of droplets mostly concentrates in a
Cdl ω Rct þ σw ω þ σw ω Cdl σw ω þ1
Z 00 ¼ j 2
(3) range of 1.87–4.61 � 0.03 μm; while the size of the distribution of the
ðCdl σ w ω1=2 þ 1Þ þ C2dl ω2 ðRct þ σw ω 1=2 Þ2
droplets are concentrated in the range of 1.81–13.31 � 0.72,
In the low frequency ω→0 range,. The real and imaginary of the 1.06–13.27 � 0.45 μm, 1.23–15.18 � 0.27 μm with the emulsions with
impedance are water content of 16.67, 26.07, 37.50 v/v%. It is obvious that the size of
the droplets sensitively increases with the increasing water content. On
the other hand, the number of droplets shows an intuitive increasing
1=2
Z’ ¼ Rs þ Rct þ σw ω
trend from 472 from 756 in a captured image of 0.16 � 0.12 mm2. In this
Z} ¼ σw ω 1=2
þ 2σ 2w Cdl (4) way, the probability density distribution of droplets apparently affected
by the water contents as shown in Fig. 4. With low water content, the
then: size differences of droplets are small, while those become larger with
Z} ¼ Z’ Rs Rct þ 2σw Cdl (5) higher water content.
In a turbulent, the distribution of droplets size generally dominated
Eq. (5) illustrates that the impedance curve turns into a line with a by the droplets break-up and coalescence. The change of velocity of the
slope of 1 in the low-frequency range on the Nyquist diagram. external force leads to the deformation and rupture of the droplets. And
Fig. 2(a) shows that the frequency range of Zw is dominated by the the frequency of droplets collision and coalescence determined the
water content. Thus, the characteristics of Zw are different from each coalescence between two drops. When applied shear forces are suffi­
other, showing that the water content of the emulsion can be identified ciently long, there would be a stable balance between the drop breakup
using impedance spectroscopy. and coalescence (Angeli and Hewitt, 2000; Ahmed and John, 2018). In
The value of fd is extracted from the impedance spectroscopy. As
shown in Fig. 3, fd increased in a strong linear trend with increasing
water content. This relationship can be fitted well in a linear regression
equation with a R-square coefficient of 0.9490, indicating a feasible
method to detect the water content of the oil-water emulsions.
In a further study, a series of experiments were conducted to confirm
the accuracy of the impedance spectroscopy method. For the oil-water
emulsions with known water content, the samples can get a recovery
of 96.8% combining the linear function. It indicates a good accuracy of
proposed method, which can be a method for the analysis of water
content of oil-water two phase system.
Some spectrum methods can be found in the published literature that
focus on the measurements of phase content in the oil-water emulsion
system. (Jin et al., 2013) measured the water content (0.01%–0.25%
w/w) in crude oil emulsions using terahertz time-domain spectroscopy
(THz-TDS). A linear relationship between the THz absorption coefficient
and the water content was proposed, which facilitates high-precision
measurements of the water content of crude oil. In addition, the
low-field NMR was used for the analysis of mixtures involving crude oils
and water (Silva et al., 2012). For mixtures between deionized water and Fig. 4. The distribution of the droplets of the emulsions with water contents of
7.40, 16.67, 26.07, 37.50 v/v%. The inset were the images of the microstruc­
petroleum, the experiments achieved excellent results, with root mean
ture of the oil-water emulsions with varying water contents.

4
M. Qing et al.
the oil-water two-phase flow, previous works have studied the distri­
bution of the size of the droplets. It has been proved that droplets size for
oil in water mixture followed a log-normal distribution (Eley et al.,
1988; Boxall et al., 2009; Voulgaropoulos et al., 2016). In this work, the
log-normal was employed to characterize the distribution of droplets
size. The results have shown that the experimental data of droplet size
can fit well with the log-normal function with an R-square coefficient of
98.7%.
The Log-normal distribution function can be expressed as:
1 ðln x μÞ2
f ðx; μ; σ Þ ¼ pffiffiffiffiffi e 2σ 2
2πxσ
where μ and σ represent logarithmic mean and standard deviation of
droplet size.
According to Fig. 4, the μ values can be calculated for the emulsions
with water contents from 2.90 to 44.40 v/v%. The points of μ versus
water content are plotted in Fig. 5 The μ increases from 1.14 to 1.57 in a
significant linear increasing trend with increasing water content. For the
W/O two-phase system, the concentration of charged ions in the water
phase is much higher than that in the oil phase. The increased size of
water droplets leads to an increase in the concentration of the charged
ions in the diffusion layer.
Based on ordinary diffusion theory, the continuity equation is a
fundamental conservation law relating the time variation of the number
density c to the macroscopic particle flux J:
∂c ∂J
¼ (8)
∂t ∂x
It can be supposed that with a high concentration of charged ions, the
macroscopic charged particle flux J at location x increases. Thus, the
diffusion frequency strongly depends on the water content of the oil-
water emulsions. Therefore, the diffusion frequency based on the
impedance spectroscopy can be used to characterize the water content.
4. Conclusion
In this project, impedance spectroscopy was employed to obtain
important information about oil-water emulsions. The diffusion fre­
quency strongly depended on the water content and increased with
increasing water content in a linear trend. The mechanism was proposed
via microstructure analysis with polarization microscopy. The images
illustrate that the distribution of the water droplets was dominated by
Fig. 5. The μ dependence of water contents (2.90–44.40 v/v%). The red line
represents the fitting linear function of the μ and water content. (For inter­
pretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred
to the Web version of this article.)
Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering 188 (2020) 106863
the water content. A linear relationship was obtained between the dis­
tribution parameter μ and water content. The water content increased
the size of the water droplets, leading to an increase in the concentration
of charged ions in the ionic double-layer, which influenced the diffusion
frequency of the emulsions. Our work provides a theoretical explanation
for the relation of impedance and emulsions, indicating that impedance
spectroscopy method could directly and effectively determine the water
content of oil-water emulsions.
Credit author statement
(7)
Meiyi Qing: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Writing
- original draft, Visualization, Investigation, Software, Validation.
Huaqing Liang: Supervision. Jinjun Zhang: Resources, Project adminis­
tration, Funding acquisition. Honglei Zhan: Writing - review & editing.
Author contributions
The manuscript was written through contributions of all authors. All
authors have given approval to the final version of the manuscript.
Notes
The authors declare no competing financial interest.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation
of China (Grant No. 51534007 and 51134006), Science Foundation of
China University of Petroleum, Beijing (No. 2462017YJRC029 and
2462018BJC005).
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.petrol.2019.106863.
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