SwRI expands High-Viscosity Flow Loop to test equipment moving heavy oils

Upgrade offers more cost-effective and comprehensive testing

2025-12-02

(Press-News.org) SAN ANTONIO — December 2, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has upgraded its High-Viscosity Flow Loop (HVFL) to meet increased demands in the oil and gas industry. The expanded and upgraded facility now enables SwRI to offer more comprehensive, efficient, and cost-effective heavy oil testing.

Increasing production of heavy oil around the world led SwRI to develop the HVFL in 2015 to gain a better understanding of flow equipment performance in extremely viscous conditions.

“Today, as operators tap into reservoirs with higher gas volume fractions, conventional pumping systems struggle to process the volatile mixture of gas and liquid, demanding advanced gas separation technologies,” said SwRI Senior Research Engineer Josh Neveu. “This presents an opportunity for more research through evaluating pump performance with highly viscous fluids while also handling gas mixed into the fluid stream, simulating multiphase issues.”

In industrial drilling systems, produced oil is rarely single phase and often has natural gas mixed into the production fluid. This makes accounting for multiphase flow a necessity, as the introduction of gas into equipment designed for liquid-only operation can impact equipment performance. Multiphase testing for heavy oil can be costly as most facilities are not optimized to handle highly viscous fluids.

“We modified our facility to start mixing air into water to see how pumps designed for single-phase liquid flow will handle multiphase flows. We will transition to heavy oil as well, and test multiphase flows with different viscosities,” Neveu said.

These upgrades allow the HVFL to complement SwRI’s Multiphase Flow Facility, which has long offered multiphase flow testing at lower viscosities.

In addition to the new multiphase capability, SwRI redesigned and optimized the HVFL, creating more permanent infrastructure that enables cost-effective and efficient testing. This upgrade also improved environmental safety by extending the facility’s oil containment barrier to fully enclose the test setup.

The initial suite of upgrades to the HVFL began in January 2025 and were completed in October. Additional upgrades will commence soon, including the introduction of heavy oil multiphase flow testing.

“We updated the facility to meet our clients’ needs,” Neveu said. “Our goal is to confirm that their equipment performs reliably in tougher, more complex environments.”

For more information, visit https://www.swri.org/markets/energy-environment/oil-gas/flow-component-testing/industrial-pump-testing-validation.

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