In this investigation, the equilibrium conditions of liquid propane hydrate formation in the presence of light hydrocarbons (C2-C5) are presented. The central composite design (CCD) as a method of the response surface methodology (RSM) was applied to minimize the number of experiments (47 runs) and to determine the optimum operating conditions for the highest equilibrium pressure. The effect of five independent variables involving temperature and gas mixture component concentration on the pressure of propane hydrate formation was studied. The thermodynamic model is based on the van der WaalsPlatteeuw (vdW-P) combined with the Peng-Robinson (PR) and Soave-Redlich-Kwong (SRK) Equations of State (EoS) and Parrish and Prausnitz approach. For the first time, simultaneously statistical and thermodynamic models were studied, and it indicates that the statistical model (Design Expert) has a perfect correlation (R2 ¼ 0.9999) with the experiment and the thermodynamic modeling by PVTsim (E ¼ 0.56%) had a better predictor than MATLAB (E ¼ 2.79%).
