Application of LSSVM strategy to estimate asphaltene precipitation during different production processes

Asphaltene precipitation is a critical problem in petroleum reservoirs that reduce the permeability of rocks significantly and has damagingly impacted production. To that end, determination of amount of asphaltene precipitation is an essentially task to overcome this problem. In this contribution, the authors estimate the asphaltene precipitation as a function of temperature, dilution ratio, and molecular weight of different n-alkanes based on the least squares support vector machine. Moreover, the present tool has been compared with other previous models and its accuracy was confirmed against them. The obtained values of R-2 and mean squared error were 0.9968 and 0.021, respectively. This tool is simple to use and can be applied as a great predictive approach for estimating the asphaltene precipitation as a function of temperature, dilution ratio, and molecular weight of different n-alkanes.