A novel three-dimensional 117.8-L pressure vessel, which is called a Pilot-Scale Hydrate Simulator (PHS), is developed to investigate the gas production performance from hydrate-bearing porous media using the huff and puff method through both experimental and numerical simulations. The methane gas and deionized water are injected into the pressure vessel to synthesize methane hydrate. The grain sizes of the quartz sand in the vessel are between 300 and 450 μm. The huff and puff stages, including the injection, the soaking, and the production, are employed for hydrate dissociation. A single vertical well at the axis of the PHS is used as the injection and production well. The whole experiment consists of 15 huff and puff cycles. The numerical simulation results agree well with the experiment. Both the experimental and numerical simulation results indicate that the injected water is mainly restricted around the well during the injection stage. The system pressure fluctuates regularly in each cycle, and the secondary hydrate is formed under the pressurization effect caused by the hot water injection in the injection stage. The gas production rate maintains approximately stable in a relatively long period. The sensitivity analysis indicates that the gas production can be enhanced with high intrinsic permeability of the deposit or by raising the temperature of the injected hot water. The mass of the water produced in each cycle has little difference and is manageable when using the huff and puff method.

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Based on currently available data from site measurements and the preliminary estimates of the gas production potential from the hydrate accumulations at the SH7 site in the Shenhu Area using the depressurization method with a single horizontal well placed in the middle of the Hydrate-Bearing Layer (HBL), the dependence of production performance on the permeabilities of the overburden (OB) and underburden (UB) layers was investigated in this modeling study. The simulation results indicated that the temperature and the pressure of the HBL were affected by the permeabilities of OB and UB and the effect of depressurization with impermeable OB and UB was significantly stronger than that with permeable boundaries. Considering the percentage of hydrate dissociation, the gas production rate and the gas-to-water ratio, the hydrate deposit with impermeable OB and UB was expected to be the potential gas production target. Nomenclature:k intrinsic permeability (m 2 ) k eff effective permeability (m 2 )

Abstract“Breathing” and “gating” are striking phenomena exhibited by flexible metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) in which their pore structures transform upon external stimuli. These effects are often associated with eminent steps and hysteresis in sorption isotherms. Despite significant mechanistic studies, the accurate description of stepped isotherms and hysteresis remains a barrier to the promised applications of flexible MOFs in molecular sieving, storage and sensing. Here, we investigate the temperature dependence of structural transformations in three flexible MOFs and present a new isotherm model to consistently analyse the transition pressures and step widths. The transition pressure reduces exponentially with decreasing temperature as does the degree of hysteresis (c.f. capillary condensation). The MOF structural transition enthalpies range from +6 to +31 kJ·mol−1 revealing that the adsorption-triggered transition is entropically driven. Pressure swing adsorption process simulations based on flexible MOFs that utilise the model reveal how isotherm hysteresis can affect separation performance.