Agglomerations of Methane Hydrate Particles in Aqueous Solutions: Insight from Dissipative Particle Dynamics Simulations.

Despite the common occurrence of hydrate particle agglomerations in engineering applications and naturally occurring environments, there is still a gap in exploring the agglomeration mechanism of gas hydrate particles in aqueous solutions due to the experimental challenges and limitations. Herein, particle agglomerations of methane hydrates are investigated by using dissipative particle dynamics. Our results show that the agglomeration behaviors of methane hydrate particles are related to particle sizes, the particle size ratios, and the shapes of hydrate particles. Before hydrate particle agglomerations, the distance between any two hydrate particles in these hydrate particle systems exhibits an oscillation manner, and their fluctuation amplitude strongly depends on the particle sizes. Furthermore, the hydrate particle motions in those agglomeration processes are consistent with previous studies at the microscopic scale. This work not only extends the research scale of hydrate particle agglomerations but also provides a new computational method framework for gas hydrate communities in the world.