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RHEOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION OF HYDRATE SLURRIES

University of British Columbia. Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering; International Conference on Gas Hydrates (6th : 2008 : Vancouver, B.C.)

The oil and gas industry is often plagued by the formation of clathrate hydrates in oil pipelines. While the industry originally had a heuristic of avoidance of clathrate hydrates they are moving to a heuristic of risk management. To successfully implement a risk management heuristic, time dependent phenomena of clathrate hydrate formation and flowline plugging must be known. The study of time dependent phenomena of formation and agglomeration are investigated using a TA Instruments AR-G2 rheometer with a pressure cell capable of operating at up to 13.8 MPa. Pressurized rheological experiments examine clathrate hydrates formed in situ. Both shear and oscillatory experiments have been conducted on the samples, giving flow and viscoelastic parameters. Shear experiments show sharp increases in viscosity upon clathrate hydrate formation indicating rapid aggregation. Transient oscillation experiments show a sharp increase in the elastic and loss moduli followed by a decrease in the loss moduli. Thus, both in situ clathrate hydrate formation and annealing are quantified. In addition these oscillatory measurements provided a novel technique for non-destructive investigation of clathrate hydrate aggregation over time.

Clathrate hydrates; Rheology

Text

eng

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0041037

Non UBC

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/