Open Access

Christian Kopeinig

• The ability of water to form cage-like structures and capture gas molecules under high pressure and low temperatures lead to problems in gas pipelines, especially in the mid-20th century. Also, there is an enormous amount of this so-called gas hydrate, captured in deep sea sediments or in terrestrial permafrost soils in which they reserve a possible degradable energy resource. On the other hand, they also maintain a high risk to enhance the ongoing climate change. At the same time, through their high energy storage ability, gas hydrates exhibit a high potential for industrial applications like alternative energy storage, carbon capture technologies or cleaning of exhaust emissions through separation and storage. But through their complex kinetics and ongoing dynamics through induction, synthesis and dissociation, the usage of hydrates is still far away from relevant industrial application. To make the potential capable there is still a huge amount of basic research necessary: Specially to shorten the induction time. An earlier thesis at FH-Vorarlberg exposed a potential method to shorten the induction time through a stirred reactor with an extremely high stirring rate without the usage of promotors. Therefore, this thesis is dedicated to expose the possible reasons for the witnessed effect through high stirring rates (>10000 rpm) at different pressure and tempera-ture conditions. The goal is to show possible physical effects to shorten the induction time of hy-drate synthesis. Therefore, a stirred reactor is used in which the possible effects should be investi-gated through the research with CO2 hydrates. In the research, there will be a closer look on phe-nomena like cavitation, increasing the phase interface through stirring or pressure fluctuations. The results of this thesis show an interesting connection between pressure, stirring rate and increased phase interface. Furthermore, there are also some exposed significances between stirring under spe-cial conditions which were exposed through statistical analyses. The results show that stirring could possibly be a new driving force when executed under the right conditions.