Vapor-hydrate phases equilibrium of (CH4+C2 H6) and (CH4+C2H4) systems

Abstract

Separation of the (C1 + C2) hydrocarbon system is of importance in natural gas processing and ethylene production. However it is the bottleneck because of its high refrigeration energy consumption, and needs to be urgently addressed. The technology of separating gas mixtures by forming hydrate could be used to separate (C1 + C2) gas mixtures at around 0 °C and has attracted increasing attention worldwide. In this paper, investigation of vapor-hydrate two-phase equilibrium was carried out for (C1 + C2) systems with and without tetrahydrofuran (THF). The compositions of vapor and hydrate phases under phase equilibrium were studied with model algorithm when structure I and structure II hydrates coexisted for the (methane + ethane) system. The average deviation between the modeled and actual mole fractions of ethane in hydrate and vapor phases was 0.55%, and that of ethylene was 5.7% when THF was not added. The average deviation of the mole fraction of ethane in vapor phase was 11.46% and ethylene was 7.38% when THF was added. The test results showed that the proposed algorithm is practicable. © China University of Petroleum (Beijing) and Springer-Verlag GmbH 2008.