Dr. Ioannis Tsimpanogiannis Tsimpanogiannis, Ioannis N. is currently an Adjunct Research Scientist at the Environmental Research Laboratory, National Research Center Demokritos, Greece. He received a Diploma of Chemical Engineering (1993) from the National Technical University of Athens, and a Ph.D. Degree in 2002 from the Chemical Engineering Department of the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, CA, USA. He has worked (2003-2006) at the Earth and Environmental Sciences Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM, USA. His research interests include: Hydrate Science and Technology; CO2 Sequestration; Flow, Phase Change, and Reaction in Porous Media; Transport of Mass and Heat in Porous Media; Oil and Gas Production (Solution-Gas Drive, Steam Drives, EOR); Applied Thermodynamics; Molecular modeling; Mesoscopic Simulations; Numerical Simulations.
Gas hydrates are ice-like crystalline structures that contain cavities in their crystal lattice. These cavities can be stabilized, if occupied by certain types of guest molecules that have appropriate size (e.g., H2, CH4, CO2). Hydrate formation is a major concern for safety and flow assurance in gas/oil pipelines. On the other hand, hydrates ability to store large volumes of gases can be beneficial in applications such as gas storage and transportation. Furthermore, the characteristic of hydrates to selectively incorporate gases in their structure has been considered in gas-mixture separation processes. In the current study, we report: (i) An overview of atomistic-level results concerning the CH4 or CO2 hydrate equilibrium using molecular dynamics and the gas storage capacities using Monte Carlo Simulations, (ii) Macroscopic thermodynamic predictions using equations of state, and (iii) a brief overview of the effort to built an experimental apparatus to measure hydrate equilibrium conditions and gas suitabilities.