Department of Chemical Engineering
And Chemical Technology
Imperial College of Science
Technology and Medicine
Exhibition Road
London
SW7 2AZ
Subject: MSc project abstract
Supervisor: Dr. J.P. Trusler
Accurate information about the properties of fluid mixtures are important to industry for efficient operation of existing plants, design of new plants, production of fluid products, and efficient and profitable exploitation of natural gas resources. Industry faces a paucity of data on the properties of pure fluids and fluid mixtures.
The objectives of this project are to make accurate experimental measurements of the density of certain gas mixtures, over wide ranges of temperature, pressure and composition, and to compare the results with the predictions of the thermodynamic models most frequently used in chemical engineering problems.
The main part of this research project is the design of a new apparatus for density measurements at high pressure. This work requires some careful mechanical and laboratory work for the determination of mass, temperature and pressure. The new apparatus will be assessed to obtain accurate experimental densities and virial coefficients of certain natural gas mixtures at pressure up to 200 bars and temperature from -20 0C to 150 0C, to achieve high measurement precision and accuracy. Also, there is a scope for some computational work to be undertaken to calculate the gas density in accordance with the exact associated thermodynamic model. This data will be compared to the predictions of the thermodynamic models most frequently used in chemical engineering problems.
The results of this research will
be directly applicable to a number of practical problems in oil
and natural gas industries where accurate knowledge of density is
required.