The second one is about gas hydrates dissociation and formation in
gas fields (a short version of the paper was published in Annals of the
New York Academy of Sciences, 2000, V. 912, p.428-436.
Gas hydrates are crystalline ice-like solids that form when water
and sufficient quantities of certain gases are combined under the right
conditions of temperature and pressure. Under these conditions, the
amount of gas stored in a given volume of hydrate is 170 times higher
than when the gas is at standard conditions. This fact contributes to
its potential as an economically recoverable energy source. Substantial
amounts of hydrates have been found in the Earth's sediments beneath
the permafrost and in ocean bottom sediments along the continental
margins. Therefore the problems associated with the production of
natural gas from these hydrate zones have become of greater interest to
the hydrocarbon industry.
Gas hydrate dissociation problems in natural reservoirs can be
formulated as a generalization of the classical Stefan problem. We have
found that there exist a few different regimes of gas hydrates
decomposition with the formation of two or more unknown moving phase
transition boundaries and formation of extended phase transition zone
("mushy region"). These problems are close to the ground freezing
problems as gas hydrates are motionless in a natural formation.