PECTIN AS NATURAL GAS HYDRATE INHIBITOR: APPLICATION OF THE AVRAMI MODEL

The study of gas hydrate formation has attracted researchers' attention due to the importance of this topic to oil and gas industries. Gas hydrates can interrupt flow during the petroleum extraction resulting in production losses as well as in safety concerns. Understanding the kinetics of the process is useful to delay hydrate formation by using kinetic inhibitors that are applied often at lower concentrations. Acquisition of experimental data on the process is important to predict ranges of conditions for hydrate formation. This work applies the Johnson-Mehl-Avrami-Kolmogorov (JMAK) phenomenological model for a set of data acquired for pectin, a natural polymer used as kinetic inhibitor, to predict the fraction of hydrate formed. Results suggest the use pectin as potential natural hydrate inhibitor, considering that the data are in agreement with the model’s prediction.