Effect of Nanobubble Evolution on Hydrate Process: A Review

As a huge reserve for potential energy, natural gas hydrates (NGHs) are attracting increasingly extra attentions, and a series of researches on gas recovery from NGHs sediments have been carried out. But the slow formation and dissociation kinetics of NGHs is a major bottleneck in the applications of NGHs technology. Previous studies have shown that nanobubbles, which formed from melt hydrates, have significant promotion effects on dissociation and reformation dynamics of gas hydrates. Nanobubbles can persist for a long time in liquids, disaccording with the standpoint of classical thermodynamic theories, thus they can participate in the hydrate process. Based on different types of hydrate systems (gas + water, gas +water +inhibitors/promoters, gas + water + hydrophilic/hydrophobic surface), the effects of nanobubble evolution on nucleation, dissociation, reformation process and “memory effect” of gas hydrates are discussed in this paper. Researches on the nanobubbles in hydrate process are also summarized and prospected in this study.