Invited Speaker Australian & New Zealand Society of Magnetic Resonance Conference 2017

Hydrate Slurry Hydrodynamics Studied using MRI (#41)

Sarah Vogt 1 , Mosayyeb Arjmandi 1 , Zachary M Aman 1 , Eric F May 1 , Paul Pickering 1 , Michael L. Johns 1
  1. University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia

Clathrate hydrates form when water forms an ice-like structure around a host molecule, usually a small non-polar molecule such as methane (CH4) or carbon dioxide (CO2).  Slurries containing fluids and hydrate particles are important to study for the oil and gas industry because methane hydrates form at high pressures and low temperatures and cause fluid dynamics problems such as plugging in deep sea pipelines.  Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an interesting way to study these systems as it is a non-invasive way to image and analyse the fluid flow of both hydrocarbon and water.  However, there are many experimental challenges to using MRI to study these systems, such as the fact that the fluid flow must generally be kept at high pressures and low temperatures for hydrates to form. To avoid some of these experimental challenges, this research uses a system of water and cyclopentane as the hydrate host, which forms a hydrate slurry at room pressure (1 bar) and temperatures below 7.7 C.  A 25 mm diameter pipeline flow loop was designed containing approximately 20 L of hydrate slurry circulating continuously, below the hydrate forming temperature, through a Bruker Biospec 9.4T Small Animal Imaging system.  This presentation will present the first MRI measurements of this cyclopentane clathrate hydrate slurry system.  Hydrate conversion is analysed using frequency and relaxation experiments and rheological information about the hydrate slurry is obtained from analysis of velocity images.