Prediction of asphaltene precipitation in crude oil

Asphaltene are problematic substances for heavy-oil upgrading processes. Deposition of complex and heavy organic compounds, which exist in petroleum crude oil, can cause a lot of problems. In this work an Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) approach for estimation of asphaltene precipitation has been proposed. Among this training the back-propagation learning algorithm with different training methods were used. The most suitable algorithm with appropriate number of neurons in the hidden layer which provides the minimum error is found to be the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm. ANN's results showed the best estimation performance for the prediction of the asphaltene precipitation. The required data were collected and after pre-treating was used for training of ANN. The performance of the best obtained network was checked by its generalization ability in predicting 1/3 of the unseen data. Excellent predictions with maximum Mean Square Error (MSE) of 0.2787 were observed. The results show ANN capability to predict the measured data. ANN model performance is also compared with the Flory-Huggins and the modified Flory-Huggins thermo dynamical models. The comparison confirms the superiority of the ANN model. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.