Enhance hydrates formation with stainless steel fiber for high capacity methane storage

In order to realize efficient gas storage of hydrate, stainless steel fiber (SSF) was added to 0.03% (mass) sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) solution for gas storage experiment. SSF can not only improve the problem that hydration heat cannot be removed effectively in the hydration process, but also improve gas storage speed and gas storage by increasing hydrate nucleation sites. Under the experimental conditions (273.2 K, 5-9 MPa), the peaks of temperature rise in SDS + SSF systems were found to become much smaller than those in SDS systems. The maximum gas storage rate and the maximum methane uptake of SSF + SDS system reached 9.89-24.90 cm³·g^-1·min^-1 and 178.65-200.89 cm³·(g H₂O)^-1, respectively. Compared with the surfactant SDS solution without SSF, they increased by 10.47%-33.22% and 9.16%-25.36%, respectively. The effect of SSF length on gas storage performance was studied. Due to the continuous thermal conduction network, longer SSF showed a higher gas storage capacity and methane uptake rate compared with shorter SSF. At the same time, compared with other metal fillers, SSF + SDS not only had excellent gas storage performance, but also the amount of SSF (0.1 g·ml^-1) was only 7.6% of foamed aluminum, and the volume gas storage density was increased by 145.4%. The use of stainless steel fiber made the best use of the thermal conductivity of metal, reduced the amount of metal used, and improved the volume density and mass density of gas storage.