Development of Predictive Techniques for Estimating Liquid Water-Hydrate Equilibrium of Water-Hydrocarbon System

Abstract

In this communication, we review recent studies by these authors for modeling the -H equilibrium. With the aim of estimating the solubility of pure hydrocarbon hydrate former in pure water in equilibrium with gas hydrates, a thermodynamic model is introduced based on equality of water fugacity in the liquid water and hydrate phases. The solid solution theory of Van der Waals-Platteeuw is employed for calculating the fugacity of water in the hydrate phase. The Henry's law approach and the activity coefficient method are used to calculate the fugacities of the hydrocarbon hydrate former and water in the liquid water phase, respectively. The results of this model are successfully compared with some selected experimental data from the literature. A mathematical model based on feed-forward artificial neural network algorithm is then introduced to estimate the solubility of pure hydrocarbon hydrate former in pure water being in equilibrium with gas hydrates. Independent experimental data (not employed in training and testing steps) are used to examine the reliability of this algorithm successfully.