Two Dimensional Simulation of Methane Production from Hydrate Using Fluent

Methane hydrate attracts recent attentions due to its large amount available and methane is a clean energy resource. In this paper, the dissociation of methane hydrate and two phase (gas/water) flow in the porous media were modeled using a 2D axisymmetric model and were simulated using the finite volume based commercial software FLUENT. The user defined functions (UDFs) were developed and the multiphase flow Eulerian model in FLUENT was used in our simulations. Comparisons with the experimental data in the literature and our one-dimensional simulation showed that the 2D model takes more time to reach steady state than the 1D model due to the no-slip boundary conditions applied at the walls. Parameter studies showed that the higher reaction constant or lower activation energy result in higher rate of hydrate dissociation.