The shortage of new light oil reservoirs increases the need to explore heavy oil reserves and
to deal with viscosity issues on their transportation through pipelines. An attractive
procedure to reduce energy consumption of this operation is to pump oil using water as a
wall lubricant in a core annular pattern. This method provides high efficiency and high fluid
flow rates, being effective in decreasing pressure drop due to the friction reduction. This
paper reports an experimental evaluation of the oil-water flow patterns on three consecutive …