Articles & Issues

Language: English

Conflict of Interest: In relation to this article, we declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Publication history: Received October 5, 2015
Accepted February 4, 2016

This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

All issues

Mechanism of methane hydrate formation in the presence of hollow silica

Hari Prakash Veluswamy Pinnelli Seetha Rama Prasad¹ Praveen Linga^†

Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117 585, Singapore ¹Gas Hydrate Division, National Geophysical Research Institute, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Uppal Road, Hyderabad 500 007, India

Praveen.Linga@nus.edu.sg

Korean Journal of Chemical Engineering, July 2016, 33(7), 2050-2062(13), 10.1007/s11814-016-0039-0

Download PDF

Abstract

Methane hydrates are studied extensively as a prospective medium for storing and transporting natural gas due to their inherent advantages, including high volumetric energy storage density, being environmentally benign and extremely safe method compared to conventional compression and liquefaction methods. Enhanced formation kinetics of methane hydrates has been reported in hollow silica due to the increased gas/liquid contact surface area available for efficient conversion of water to hydrates. This work elucidates the mechanism of methane hydrate formation in light weight hollow silica. Hollow silica-to-water ratio was varied and its effect on the methane hydrate formation/dissociation morphology was observed. There exists a critical hollow silica-to-water ratio (1 : 6) beyond which the hydrates preferentially crystallize on the top of the bed by drawing water from the interstitial pores, whereas below this ratio the hydrate formation occurs within the bed between inter-particular spaces of hollow silica. Due to the very low bulk density, a small fraction of hollow silica was observed to be displaced from the bed during the hydrate formation above the critical hollow silica to water ratio.

Keywords

Gas Hydrates Methane Hydrate Morphology Hollow Silica Gas Storage

References

Avrami M, J. Chem. Phys., 7, 1103 (1939)
Avrami M, J. Chem. Phys., 8, 212 (1940)
Avrami M, J. Chem. Phys., 9, 177 (1941)
Susilo R, Ripmeester JA, Englezos P, AIChE J., 53(9), 2451 (2007)
Nambiar A, Babu P, Linga P, Can. J. Chem., 93(8), 808 (2015)