Heat Induced Evolution of Phase Transformations in Tetrahydrofuran Hydrate Bearing Sediment

Abstract

Heat conduction and phase transformations are basic physicalchemical process and control the kinetics of dissociation, fluid flow and strata deformation during hydrate dissociation in sediments. This paper presents a simplified analysis of the thermal process by assuming that the heatinduced evolution can be decoupled from flow and deformation processes. Selfsimilar solutions for one, twoand threephase transformation fronts are obtained. A series of experiments on THFhydratebearing sediments was conducted to test the theory. The theoretical, numerical and experimental results on the evolution of hydrate dissociation front in the sediment are in good agreement.