Magnetically separable 0D-2D Fe3O4-GO nanocomposite with high thermal diffusivity for methane hydrate formation

Hydrate-based industrial applications such as gas storage and transportation, seawater desalination and cold storage have received a lot of attention in recent years. The core problem of increasing the formation rate has also been studied extensively, but the accompanying problem of heat dissipation has not been well addressed. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a highly thermal diffusivity nanocomposite of Fe3O4-graphene oxide for removing the heat released during hydrate formation. First, graphene oxide was prepared by a modified Hummers method and then loaded nano Fe3O4 particle by co-precipitation method. Testing shows that the thermal diffusivity of 20 g/L nanocomposite suspension was increased by 55.07% relative to the 2 mM SDS solution. Then, different concentrations of the nanocomposite were introduced into the hydrate formation reaction, and the results demonstrated that the coefficient of heat dissipation of the reaction process could reach 0.97762 +/- 0.0060 at the concentration of 20 g/L and the reaction pressure of 7 MPa. Even at high pressure (9 MPa) with strong exothermic properties of the hydrate formation, the coefficient of heat dissipation could still reach 0.9611 +/- 0.0136. Finally, the visualization observation demonstrated nanocomposite could be almost recycled within 10 s due to the excellent magnetic properties. The experimental results show that the nanocomposite could exhibit sufficiently excellent heat dissipation capability in the industrial process.