Solid-fluid equilibrium measurements of benzene in methane and implications for freeze-out at LNG conditions

Abstract Information about the solubility of benzene in light hydrocarbons is particularly important for the prediction of freeze-out risk in LNG production. Engineering models developed to predict this risk need to be tested against high quality experimental data covering a range of conditions to assess their validity. A visual high pressure sapphire cell, housed in a specialized cryogenic environmental chamber, was employed to measure the melting temperature of methane + benzene binary systems at temperatures from 120 K, pressures up to 22 MPa, and benzene concentrations ranging from 120 to 1012 parts per million (ppm) by mole. The results obtained were compared with literature data and the predictions of the thermodynamic model implemented in the software package ThermoFAST. These comparisons reveal that the literature data are in fact consistent with each other, and with the measurements and predictions made in this work, within their experimental scatter. ThermoFAST was able to represent the melting temperatures obtained for benzene concentrations of 1012 and 199 ppm with r.m.s deviations of 0.7 and 3.4 K, respectively. At 120 ppm and 6.3 MPa, the measured solid-liquid equilibrium (SLE) temperature deviated from the ThermoFAST prediction by less than 2 K. However, at the higher temperature conditions representative of solid vapour equilibrium (SVE), the data measured for mixtures with concentrations at 199 and 750 ppm benzene deviated from the model predictions by up to 5 K.