Low-carbon olefin separation is important in petrochemical industry. Separation of methane/ethylene mixture was studied by hydrate formation in water-in-oil (w/o) emulsion during isochoric and isothermal processes in an agitated reactor. With pressure-volume-temperature (PVT) method

the ethylene hydrate formation kinetics and separation efficiency were evaluated at various operating conditions of temperature and emulsion consumption. Ethylene concentration in gas mixture decreased from 34% to 9.97% and its recovery achieved to 90.36% with the use of 100mL emulsion at temperature of 273.35 K. Lower temperature and more emulsion were favorable for the recovery of ethylene. A kinetics-controlled model using fugacity difference as the driving force was proposed

which fitted the experiment data well and could predict experimental output accurately from operating parameters.